Hi friends,
I'm a software engineer recently asked to look into HA option available that will best fit some requirements at my company. I'm fairly new to the HA technologies in MS sql server, so please correct any misunderstandings I may have.
The requirement is that we want to setup a 2nd data center to host our web-based solution to provide a higher availability (SLA).
As the 2nd data center is geographically away, we would like to use transactional replication for cross-site database synchronization, where a site/db is active while another site/db is passive. We can switch over to the 2nd data center and make it active
while making the 1st data center passive if needed. Hence, it seems like peer-to-peer transactional replication will fit this part of the bill well.
The problem is that we know with replication, there's possible data loss due to latency issues. My questions are:
(1) What would be the best HA option here? (replication? failover clustering?)
(2) Can we combine DB mirroring with replication? We want two-way replication, but DB mirroring does not support peer-to-peer replication. So can we still setup two-way replication usingbidirectional replication with DB mirroring?
Ideally, the setup will be like the following: Site 1 has DB1 and DB1_mirror. Site 2 has DB2 and DB2_mirror. Mirroring is set up between DB1 and DB1_mirror, as well as between DB2 and DB2_mirror. Replication is set up between DB1 and DB2. And if a failover
occurs from DB1 to DB1_mirror, replication will still work to pass transaction data from DB1_mirror to DB2. And likewise in reverse.
Experts please advise~ thanks.