Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible

Warm Standby Availability

Warm standby refers to a database that has a copy set up on separate hardware. A warm standby solution can be achieved with log shipping. Log shipping involves periodically restoring a transaction log backup from the primary server to a warm standby server, making that server ready to recover at a moment's notice. In case of a failure, the warm standby server and the most recent transaction-log backups are ready to go. Apart from this, log shipping has the following benefits:

• It can be implemented without exotic hardware and may be significantly cheaper.
• It has been used for many years and is a robust and reliable technology.
• It can be used for disaster recovery, high availability and reporting scenarios.
• Implementing log shipping is simple because Microsoft has a user-friendly wizard, and when implemented it is easy to maintain and troubleshoot.
• The primary server and the warm standby server do not have to be in the same domain or same subnet. As long as they can talk to each other, log shipping works.
• There is no real distance limitation between the primary and warm standby servers, and log shipping can be done over the Internet.
• Log shipping allows shipping the transaction log from one primary server to multiple warm standby servers. It also allows having different copy and restore times for each warm standby server. This can be useful to set up one secondary server as a standby for disaster recovery purposes and use another secondary for reporting ...