SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR)

This demo video is a compilation of different database recovery techniques that SQL Server DBAs should be familiar and comfortable with. We will look at recovering a database to a specific point in time, isolating critical objects or using table partitioning as an HA/DR option (more commonly called online piecemeal restore) and performing page-level restores.

It's not enough to protect your user databases. System databases are at the core of a SQL Server instance. Without them, you won't be able to start your SQL Server service. In this lesson, we will look at what they are and what they are responsible for. We will also look at how to protect the system databases and how we can prepare in case the system databases are unavailable.

This is the demo that accompanies the lesson on protecting system databases. We will look at recovering a SQL Server instance when the drive that hosts the system databases becomes unavailable and how to move the system databases to a different drive as part of your disaster recovery process.

This lesson talks about database mirroring, how it works, the different scenarios that we need to deal with and the factors affecting failover time. The concepts learned in this lesson will form the basis for understanding the new SQL Server 2012 Availability Groups feature.

This is the first demo that accompanies the lesson on database mirroring. We will look at a common database mirroring configuration - SQL Server instances that are in the same Active Directory domain. We will also simulate some of the scenarios we talked about in the lesson - failure of the mirror database and simultaneous failure of both the mirror server and the witness server - and how those failures affect database availability and the SEND the REDO queues in a database mirroring configuration.

This is the second demo that accompanies the lesson on database mirroring. We will look at configuring database mirroring across servers that are not members of an Active Directory domain. The steps in doing so are tricky so make sure to test this out in your lab prior to implementing it in your production environment.

This lesson describes how SQL Server log shipping works and the underlying concepts behind it. At a high level, log shipping is simply an automated process of taking a log backup, copying it and restoring it on a standby database. It's really no different from how transaction log backup and restore works.

This is the demo that accompanies the lesson on SQL Server log shipping. We will go thru the traditional way of configuring log shipping for a SQL Server database using SQL Server Management Studio. We will also look at a potential solution that you can use even on editions of SQL Server that don't officially support log shipping, such as the Express Editions

This lesson discusses the fundamentals of Windows Server Failover Clustering in the context of a SQL Server failover clustered instance. We will look at the different concepts to understand how Windows Server Failover Clustering works to support highly available SQL Server databases. The concepts learned in this lesson also form the foundation for understanding the new SQL Server 2012 Availability Groups feature.

This is the first demo that accompanies the lesson on SQL Server failover clustering fundamentals. We will build a traditional 2-node SQL Server failover clustered instance on Windows Server 2012 from start to finish and install SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1.

SQL Server 2012 natively supports multi-subet/geographically dispersed clusters. In this second demo on failover clustering, we will build a 2-node SQL Server failover clustered instance that spans across multiple geographical locations. We will also look at the different network configurations that need to be considered to achieve our recovery objectives and service level agreements