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Achieving HA/DR for SQL Server Without Breaking the Bank

June 30, 2023 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Achieving HADR for SQL Server Without Breaking the Bank

Achieving HA/DR for SQL Server Without Breaking the Bank

High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) are essential requirements for all database environments, especially mission-critical ones. However, many businesses face challenges in achieving HA/DR without significantly inflating costs. If you’re grappling with these issues, this article will shed light on an effective solution.

SQL Server Standard Edition is widely used, but it comes with certain limitations: it supports only two nodes in a cluster. However, by leveraging the capabilities of SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, you can overcome this limitation, enabling replication of data to a third node for disaster recovery.

This strategy could save you over 70% on your SQL Server licensing by allowing you to use SQL Server Standard Edition to create a SANLess SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) instead of upgrading to SQL Server Enterprise Edition and using Always On Availability Groups.

This blog post aims to guide you through the process of using SIOS DataKeeper for data recovery on a third node that is not part of the cluster.

Configuring Your Nodes

In this scenario, let’s consider that you have two nodes, namely DataKeeper-1 and DataKeeper-2, configured in a cluster. These nodes have their E drive replicating with each other. Also, DataKeeper-1 is replicating to a third node, DataKeeper-3, which is not part of the cluster. It’s important to note that with SQL Server Standard Edition, the third node can never be part of the cluster.

Preparing the Third Node

Firstly, ensure that DataKeeper-3 is separate from the cluster. With this, you now have a two-node cluster (DataKeeper-1 and DataKeeper-2) with SQL Server configured as a failover cluster instance, but still replicating to the third node, DataKeeper-3, using SIOS DataKeeper.

Navigating a Disaster Recovery Process

So, how would this work in an actual disaster? Here are the steps you would need to follow:

  1. Simulate a Disaster: In this case, to simulate a disaster, we take SQL Server offline on the cluster (DataKeeper 1 and 2).
  2. Switch to DataKeeper 3: With SQL Server offline, we switch over to DataKeeper-3. The volume E on DataKeeper 3, however, is initially not accessible.
  3. Unlock the Volume: To unlock the volume on DataKeeper-3, you would need to execute a command-line operation as shown in the tutorial video called ‘emcmd . switchovervolume’
  4. Attach Databases: In a real disaster, you’ll want to have a standalone instance of SQL Server running on DataKeeper-3. From this standalone instance, you could then attach the user-defined databases.
  5. Replicate Back to the Cluster: Data written on DataKeeper-3 is replicated back to DataKeeper-1 and DataKeeper-2. This can be verified using the SIOS DataKeeper interface.

Post-Disaster Recovery

Once the disaster is resolved, you can switch back the volume to the original source using a similar process.

By leveraging SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, you can implement a robust, cost-effective, and efficient high availability/disaster recovery strategy for your SQL Server environment. This process not only helps save significant costs by eliminating the need for upgrading to SQL Server Enterprise Edition, but it also ensures data availability and a quick recovery during a disaster.

Check out this video for a complete walkthrough of the process and ensure your SQL Server remains resilient, without breaking the bank.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: DataKeeper Cluster Edition, DKCE, SQL Server High Availability

How to Install a SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition License Key

January 6, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How to Install a SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition License Key

How to Install a SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition License Key

Once you have installed SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software and have activated your license, you will need to install your license key before you can get started. This 4 minute video will review how to install SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software and demonstrate how to activate your license to get started protecting your critical applications.

Watch as a SIOS support representative demonstrates each of the three key prerequisites required to install SIOS licenses: ensuring you have the latest version and updates of SIOS DataKeeper software; use our simple license key manager to validate your activated licenses from purchased entitlements, download and apply license keys and start your SIOS DataKeeper software.

This video also walks through the process of access our SIOS Documentation portal, where you can find release notes, installation guides, technical documentation and information detailing SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition as well as a wide range of topics on everything SIOS.

View tips and convenient insights on how to complete steps fast and simply.  Now you and begin protecting your critical applications with SIOS DataKeeper clustering software

How to install DataKeeper Cluster Edition License Key

Reproduced from SIOS

 

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: DataKeeper Cluster Edition

SIOS Product Update: What’s New in SIOS Protection Suite and DataKeeper Cluster Edition – Windows

March 26, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

SIOS Product Update: What’s New in SIOS Protection Suite and DataKeeper Cluster Edition – Windows

SIOS is pleased to announce the release of version 8.7.1 of our SIOS Protection Suite-Windows and DataKeeper Cluster Edition-Windows products. The new release broadens support and adds new features to meet our customers’ needs for easy, cost-optimized high availability.

The following features and additional support are being introduced as part of this update for DataKeeper and SIOS Protection Suite:

  • Public Cloud:

    • In Azure:
      • Additional support for multiple virtual IP addresses using the Azure Load Balancer Multiple Frontends function, allows easier configuration and management of SIOS Protection Suite.
    • In AWS:
      • A wide range of instance types are now supported, including AWS Nitro System instances that enable high performance, high availability, high security, and bare metal capabilities to eliminate virtualization overhead.
  • Database:

    • EDB Postgres Advanced Server
      • Continuing our expansion of key databases, we can now protect EDB Postgres Advanced Server, an open-source database management system used as an alternative to Oracle.
    • SQL Server 2019
      • Now tested and supported on both SIOS Protection Suite – Windows and DataKeeper Cluster Edition – Windows on all Windows Server platforms 2016 and later (Released to the market in November 2019)

What’s next? Let us know what you’d like to see and check back for more updates!

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Blog posts Tagged With: DataKeeper Cluster Edition, sios protection suite

DataKeeper Cluster Edition for SQL Server High Availability In AWS Cloud

February 9, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

The potential cost savings of moving to the cloud is nearly impossible not to consider. However, after you stop counting the money you are going to save, you start thinking about things like security and availability and wonder whether the cloud is for you. But fear not, we’ve got just the right solution – SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition.

In a traditional data center, you have the control and can deploy whatever security and high availability solution you like. However, once you decide to move your servers to the cloud your choices can become much more limited. It doesn’t matter whether you’re with Amazon, Google or Microsoft, outages in the cloud can and do occur and you need to do whatever you can to mitigate such risks.

Amazon Web Services

Let’s take a closer look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for instance. What are the options you have to ensure that your SQL Server database can survive an unexpected outage? While some applications can be deployed in a load balanced configuration across multiple availability zones, SQL Server is generally not deployed in a load balanced configuration. What this means is that SQL Server itself resides in a single availability zone and if that zone should become unavailable, your whole application stack can come to a grinding halt.

SQL Server 2008 R2 and its limitations

If you read this article by Miles Ward, you will see that with SQL Server 2008 R2, your availability options are pretty limited. In that article on page 11, there is a nice chart that lays out your HA options. As you will see, the options are severely limited and mostly fall outside of the category which would be described as HA. Log shipping, mirroring and transactional replication are pretty much the only options you have, and they are more of a data protection options rather than HA options. If you want Microsoft failover clustering, you will find yourself out of luck due to some network limitations (clients can’t connect to a clustered IP address) in AWS and the lack of a shared disk resource required for traditional SQL clusters.

AWS

If you are looking to deploy SQL Server 2012, your options get a little better. As described by Jeremy Peschka, with a little manual intervention you can deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups in AWS to do asynchronous replication from your data center to AWS, or even between AWS availability groups. Of course this assumes you have the SQL 2012 Enterprise license required for AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The only “issue” is that AWS really doesn’t support moving cluster IP address from one server to another, so client redirection has to be done manually using the ec2-unassign-private-ip-addresses and ec2-assign-private-ip-addresses commands after switchover that Peschka describes in his article. All-in-all this is a very manual process, which again does not really fit the description of a highly available system.

A Solution To The Limitations

If you can live without automated recovery and with the limitations of AlwaysOn Availability Groups that I described in a previous blog post, then you might just want to go ahead and try the AlwaysOn Availability Group deployment in AWS. However, if you are looking for an easier, more affordable, more robust HA solution, I have some really good news. SIOS Technology Corp has been looking at this problem and has developed a solution that overcomes all of the limitations previously described and will be available as an AMI for easy deployment. This solution is currently in private beta, but will be widely available later this year.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

The SIOS solution is based on SQL server in a Microsoft Failover Clustering using DataKeeper Cluster Edition host based replication. By using hosted based replication they have overcome the first obstacle of clustering in EC2 – lack of shared storage. The second obstacle that SIOS had to overcome was the issue of client redirection described by Peschka; the client access point needs to be manipulated from within EC2, not failover clustering. SIOS has built intelligence into their AMI solution such that the reassigning of the IP address is automated as part of the cluster failover process, effectively simulating the behavior you would normally expect from a cluster.

And because all of this is built on top of failover clustering, this can be deployed using SQL 2008/2008 R2 or 2012. Even the Standard Edition of SQL Server will support a 2-node cluster so the cost savings vs. deploying SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability groups could be substantial.

Let me know what you think. Does SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition sound interesting? What are you doing today to ensure the availability of your SQL Server EC2 instances?

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2013/01/11/sql-server-high-availability-in-aws-cloud/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified, Datakeeper Tagged With: Amazon AWS, Cloud, DataKeeper Cluster Edition, High Availability, SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 R2

Datakeeper Cluster Edition 7.5 Now Support Windows Server 2012

February 7, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Benefits Of Using DataKeeper Cluster Edition

Great news for you Windows Server 2012 early adopters – you can now use DataKeeper Cluster Edition with Windows Server 2012. I’ll be posting some Windows Server 2012 Step-by-Step articles before the end of the year and will be sure to include some multisite cluster examples as well. In the meantime, if you want to build clusters based on Windows Server 2012 and want to eliminate shared storage as a single point of failure or you want to stretch your cluster across geographic locations you can do that with DataKeeper Cluster Edition v7.5.

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2012/12/19/datakeeper-cluster-edition-7-5-now-support-windows-server-2012/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified, Datakeeper Tagged With: DataKeeper, DataKeeper Cluster Edition, Windows Server 2012

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