Re: In lieu of a mirrored SBS server
- From: "Larry Struckmeyer" <lstruckmeyer(at)mis-wizards(dot)com>
- Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:53:22 -0500
Hi Barret,
I would like to see a honest survey of the number and duration of SBS
failures. I have supported them since 4.0 (well, not many 4.0) and have
never had a failure.
I still support one that started life as 4.5 and is now 2003. It is a P3
550 with the max ram allowed on that platform of 768 MB.
The key to longevity is good hardware and a robust UPS that protects the
server from power fluctuations. And, of course, robust hard drive
subsystems, read SCSI or SAS, to which you pay some attention.
Having said all of that, the best way to do what your customer seems to
want, imo, is to have an identical server in another room to which one
restores backups. Daily or hourly, as your customer insists. Or, in
another building or another town or another country, or all three depending
on the customers tolerance for physical disaster beyond the mechanical
failure of the server. You could do this with one of the imaging products
or with a "swingit kit" from www.sbsmigration.com for the cloning of the
server.
The reason for the image or the swing is to avoid having to disjoin and
rejoin all the workstations. You will need either a separate license or
software assurance (SA) to do this, and as I understand it, SA only allows
for a cold spare, which may not be enough for your customer.
If your customer can't stand any downtime you probably should look to hosted
service in a Tier One Data Farm, with multiple ISP's in your building and
really good generators and come to think of it, maybe a bomb shelter.
--
Larry
"Eugene Tan" <TechHelp-at.insights.com.sg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:uhz9NusLIHA.4272@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
hi Barret,
Your client is interested in business continuity, so you shd first define
to what degree of continuity or down time is acceptable, together with
the cost to implement that.
SBS is a low-cost, single server solution that doesn't lend itself to
failover or clustering solution easily, and in any case such a solution
is of a different cost-class if zero downtime is what you have in mind.
If the anxious client wants to recover the server as quickly as possible
wrt data or services, this may be possible with a product such as
ShadowProtect. It is able to take snapshots of changes to the server's
drives every 15 minutes, so you can recover to a point in time assuming
you deploy the necessary hardware to support this function including
storage, and even another server h/w which doesn't have to be identical.
But note this isn't a clustering service, which means someone has to
notice that a server is down, and then someone has to do the recovery
to the (temp) replacement server and fire it up.
Another way might be to run SBS in a VM on some very robust server
h/w which can then be brought up in another VM running on another
robust h/w - again we're just restarting from what's saved on the drive.
HTH,
Eugene Tan
===========================
"barret bonden" <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:71_1j.34$G_5.20@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'd like to create a mirrored SBS server for an anxious client , a
"cluster" in modern parlance- given that SBS does not support this I've
been reading about trying to get the next best thing - another machine on
the LAN that is in essentially the same state at the server, ready to be
given the server's role quickly and easily.
What's the best way of doing this ? The literature on the web seems
divided and confused. My current thoughts revolve around making a second
DC and periodically copying data files to it - but what about the
Exchange server ? What happens if I restore a backup of the server to it
(with system sate ? ) Will this recreate the Exchange state and email,
etc ?
Is this article from MS reliable ?
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServerSolutions/SBS/en/library/f6d5c71a-6eb8-43fe-aa86-327166ef3e901033.mspx?mfr=true
Is this step "
3.
On the Continuing Microsoft Windows Small Business Server Setup page,
click Cancel.
right ? Has anyone here done this ?
This article
http://www.petri.co.il/install_dc_from_media_in_windows_server_2003.htm
confuses me in that I don't understand how to install SBS on another
machine without it becoming a second DC during the install (based on my
experience with the standard server product) - not how the author works
through his process.
In general none of these ideas seem fast and reliable enough for this
customer; 10 people are idle if the server goes down. Is one better off
with a third party application like Acronis True Image ?
.
- References:
- In lieu of a mirrored SBS server
- From: barret bonden
- Re: In lieu of a mirrored SBS server
- From: Eugene Tan
- In lieu of a mirrored SBS server
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