January 5, 2012 at 10:57 am
I am looking for opinions on the value of setting up reverse logshipping.
We have two datacenters and we use logshipping to replicate the data from datacenter A to datacenter B. We have gone through the pains to get outtage windows so we could fail over to datacenter B and setup logshipping from datacenter B to datacenter A and then failed back to datacenter A (which is the primary).
Now I understand this has potential for convenience, HOWEVER, is it really worth it? It's rare, but it has happened where I needed to reseed the database at datacenter B. In that process all reverse logshipping is lost. So unless I get another outtage to failover and set things up, it will be hit and miss what will be ready to logship from datacenter B back to datacenter A in the event we need to fail everything over to datacenter B.
Also... the point of datacenter B is so we can continue to do business in the event something catastrophic happens to datacenter A. if that's the case, we would have nothing to reverse logship to!
So I'm looking for opinions on the matter because I am a junior level DBA and i have a lot to learn. This may not make sense to me, but I could be missing the big picture.
Thanks,
Kim
January 5, 2012 at 3:26 pm
I've worked with this sort of scenario before and it can be worth while setting this up.
In the event of a planned failover, e.g. for maintenance, where you need to patch your primary server but don't want more down time than a failover and log restore it's a good option being able to log ship in both directions. You can patch your DR, failover to DR and patch your primary, then fail back.
In the event of a real disaster and you lose your primary, who cares about log shipping back to primary not working, you have a bigger problem than log shipping as you don't even have a server. You run on DR until the primary is back up, then re-establish log shipping back to the primary, then fail back to primary. You can then re-establish log shipping back to DR. If you have backups of the system databases on both servers you don't even need to recreate the relevant jobs.
Cheers
Leo
Leo
Nothing in life is ever so complicated that with a little work it can't be made more complicated.
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