Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

19.1. Log Shipping Deployment Scenarios

This section describes different scenarios in which log shipping is deployed: as a warm standby server to maintain a backup database copy in the same physical location to protect from a primary server failure; as a disaster recovery solution whereby the two servers are geographically separated in case the local area where the primary server resides suffers from a disaster; or as a reporting solution whereby the secondary server is used to satisfy the reporting needs.

19.1.1. Log Shipping to Create a Warm Standby Server

A common log-shipping scenario is as a warm standby server whereby the log-shipping secondary server is located close to the primary server. If the primary server goes down for planned or unplanned downtime, the secondary server takes over and maintains business continuity. Then, the DBA may choose to failback when the primary server becomes available. Sometimes, log shipping is used instead of Windows failover clustering, as it is a less expensive solution; for example, clustering requires a shared disk system that an organization may not own. Clustering also requires Windows failover-cluster compatible hardware that appears in the Hardware Compatibility List. Log shipping does not have such hardware requirements, so an organization may already own hardware that is not failover-cluster compatible that can be used for log shipping.

Unlike clustering, log shipping failover is always a manual process. This means you must initiate ...