Disk Cloning/Licensing Issue

[djones2002]

Howdy.

We are putting a high-end box in place to be our main database server. By high-end, I mean a dual-processor, 2gb RAM box with RAID 1. We are a small place (only 60 users), however the database is going to serve as our "business runner" application. As such, we want to maintain a duplicate of the box in storage in case the main box ever fails. In keeping with this philosophy, we were wondering if Microsoft allows to maintain a duplicate box that is kept in storage and only coming online when the other box is shutdown for the purposes of updating the data. Specifically licensing. Is it possible to use only one server license? Also, will Active Directory allow for a duplicate machine and not issue multiple SIDs?

Thanks for any info.

Dennis Jones

 

[wdoellefeld]

Never seen something like that specifically stated either way.

You can take an image of the server (which technically is the same as a backup) and keep it ready to deploy. In your case it could be said to anyone that asks.. your "storing" your "backup that's ready to deploy" on this other server. See what I mean?



FRCP

http://www.frcp.net

 

[Castor66]

How often will this 'updating the data' process occur? Are you planning to keep a whole server in storage? Seems a bit of a waste to me. It might be better to have multiple instances of the databases.

 

[kmcferrin]

Forgive me if I am misunderstanding, but it sounds like you want to have a second server that is basically a mirror image of the server that you are running just in case something goes wrong. What you want is some sort of fault tolerant solution.

There are a number of servers available from most major vendors that should do the trick. Most of the have onboard RAID 5, multiple processors, power supplies, drive bays, NICs, etc, all of them hot swap. With a highly fault tolerant server it's going to take a major issue to take your server down (i.e., system board fries, server catches on fire, someone spills a soda into it). Granted, those tend to be a little more expensive, but if you're already thinking of buying a complete second server then you're already at that price point.

The other alternative is to create a cluster for purposes of fault tolerance. Depending upon your OS and application, this may or may not be possible. But if the database were SQL Server running clustered on Windows 2000 or 2003 Server, it should be fairly easy to do. The application and the OS would take care of making sure that the databases were constantly up to date, as well as automatically handling failover if one of your servers should die. That ends up being a little more expensive since it requires more spending on licensing, but for something that is highly critical it is worth it.

At my site we do not have clustered servers, but most of our servers are fault tolerant. It would take a mainboard or CPU failure in most instances to knock one of our servers offline. We run all sorts of applications, including databases, supporting around 450 users. Oh yeah, we're also a hospital. While patient care isn't going to be compromised if a server goes down, these are critical systems.

 

[wdoellefeld]

kmcferrin has it right long term. I just covered the licensing issue and gave you a suggestion about what to tell the men in black if they come knocking.

If this server is as mission critical as you say I would follow kmcferrin's advise and build more fault tolerence into it. Instead of thinking so much about "how fast can I recover if down" the thinking needs to be "how do I stay up".



FRCP

http://www.frcp.net

 

[comtec17]

Check into MS Clustering of the data.