Hi,
I'm working on a project to implement a Disaster Recovery Center for a customer with a mission critical that care about data availability.
The main DC has been equipped with a redundancy from the the tiers, Network, Hardware and Third party software and application including the Windows server 2012 FC. From the DB side we have Four DB Servers configured using MS SQL 2012 Enterprise with Failover Cluster two are active and two passives. in addition, we have shared storage on the SAN. All servers are native and not virtualized.
The availability on the SLA require to require the following Up Time:
- Disaster recovery management & replication applications shall also be implemented allowing the DR site to automatically takeover the operations from the primary data center in the event of a critical failure in the primary data center
- Ensuring uptime, performance and other key performance requirements including data backup & business continuity
- 99.84% availability on the PBH.
The DR is ready with the Network, Hardwar and OS now, identical but a scale down from the DC. I have two DB servers on the DR and want to implement the real time DB replication between DC and DR and I want to meet with the Zero RTO.
The challenge I have now is figuring out the best and least cost solution for the DB replication? Since in DC we are using the Failover cluster for the four nodes. I searched and found this HA solution is not working for sites replication but local.
I’ve researched about the AO availability groups solution and I believe it will work on my scenario but the problem here is moving and migrating from the current Failover Cluster to the AO Availability group and the challenges are:
- Additional huge cost for the new licenses, as I believe the four DB on the DC and another Two on the DR and the six of them will be active.
- Additional investment and upgrade to the current SAN storage and new reconfiguration as I believe that each node has its attached storage separately.
I’ve consulted with a local MS Partner and he told me that other replication methods like mirroring and Log shipping will not work on my case. He advised with only the AO availability groups.
I’m a bit confused now and cannot continue with my work until figuring out the best and least cost solution on my case so please advise on this matter.
Regards
Jshamasneh