NAV SQL Server DR Solution

stevodevo
stevodevo Member Posts: 4
edited 2011-02-01 in SQL General
Hi All,

I'm running NAV 2009 SP1 on SQL 2008 SP1. I've been asked to come up with a disaster recovery solution for my company that will allow us to continue working in NAV should our primary SQL server fail in any way. We are very prone to power outages, weather etc.

I've been playing around with Amazon Web Services and have a SQL Server up there in 'The Cloud' that I'd like to use as our DR option.

What is the best option to sync the database between our primary site and the Amazon site? Our database is about 1GB in size, so just copying the full database over each night probably isn't the best solution.

I was thinking, log shipping or some type of replication. What works best for NAV?

Thanks for your advice.

Steve

Comments

  • David_Singleton
    David_Singleton Member Posts: 5,479
    Log Shipping works fine.
    David Singleton
  • sh
    sh Member Posts: 24
    I vote for Log Shipping. "Replication" isn't a real DR solution.
    Assuming you have a dedicated highspeed WAN connection towards Amazon Web Services, Asynchronous Database Mirroring might be an option as well (depends on your transaction volume). You will need SQL Server Enterprise Edition for that, though.
  • bbrown
    bbrown Member Posts: 3,268
    stevodevo wrote:
    ...We are very prone to power outages, weather etc...

    Wouldn't this also impact access to the remote (backup) database? If your issues are as severe as you make them sound, why not just host NAV at a commerial site that already has DR capacity.
    There are no bugs - only undocumented features.
  • stevodevo
    stevodevo Member Posts: 4
    Thanks for the tips guys. I've setup Log Shipping from my NAV database, and the log files are being backed up and restored to the DR database and I have the DB there set up in Read-Only mode.

    When I connect up via the NAV client, I don't see any of the new transactions (POs, Customers, SOs etc). Any ideas why? Like I said, the transaction logs are reporting as being backed up and restored just fine (no errors in the SQL Logs).
  • bbrown
    bbrown Member Posts: 3,268
    "...the log files are being ...restored..." and "I have the DB there set up in Read-Only mode"

    Those would seem to be conflicting statements.
    There are no bugs - only undocumented features.
  • stevodevo
    stevodevo Member Posts: 4
    bbrown wrote:
    "...the log files are being ...restored..." and "I have the DB there set up in Read-Only mode"

    Those would seem to be conflicting statements.

    Hopefully your post makes you feel like more of a man - I didn't see any useful information in there at all.

    For some weird reason, when you set up Transaction Log Shipping, there is a tab in there called "Restore Transaction Log" and I have the job set up to "restore files from the destination folder by a SQL Server Agent job running on the secondary server instance". When I connect to the secondary server instance, I find the database there that the logs are being restored to that is in a Standby / Read-Only state.

    Guess I've done something wrong, so maybe you could enlighten me with another comment? :)

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