The DR Cloud: An Example
Disclaimer: The enterprise Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) that I will be using is for offered by the company I work for. I have been there 10 years and I am proud of our product set so I may be a little bias. However, these steps should be similar for most IaaS offerings like that of Amazon, GoGrid and RackSpace. To learn more about the product that is demo’d from visit http://theenterprisecloud.com We also have a similar hour based service at http://vcloudexpress.terremark.com. All that said, pay more attention the concepts not so much the platform. This is not meant as a commercial.
In the first part, I detailed the benefits and reasons for DR in the cloud. I ended with a high level sample architecture.
In this post, we will look at an example of doing DR to the cloud with SQL Server. We will be using Database Mirroring but you could use home grown log shipping, replication, incremental nightly loads, or third party products that do block level replication to an offline instance. So lets get started.
Part one: Create the DR SQL Server
1. Hit the create server button in the web interface.
2. Select the OS and template. Note: If you want to use SQL Server Enterprise Edition, just use a Windows template and install SQL from an ISO. You will need to do this if you want to use asynchronous mirroring and compression.
3. Name and size the Server. You can skimp on the resources and add more RAM and VPU’s in the event of failover.
4. Set the network. It will need to be DMZ but we will lock it down at the firewall.
5. Organize as you wish.
6. Add disk space and power on.
Part two: Configure network access.
1. Set up an internet accessible port to the server. Do not fret. We are going to use a certificate and data will encrypted on the wire.
2. Create a node for the Mirror.
Part three: Configuring mirroring.
1. Backup your database and get it to your mirror. (I am just using RDP but if you DB is large, setup a more robust copy method)
2. Restore the database with norecovery at the mirror.
3. Send diff(if needed) and at least one log.
4. Restore diff(if needed) and the log with norecovery
5. Set up database mirroring on port 1521 using a certificate.
Please refer to this article for directions on how to set up mirroring with a cert.
This content is published under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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