Hyper-V replication instead of SQL Server Mirroring

  • Hello Gurus!

    I know SQL Server very well as a developer but I'm not very familiar with administrative tasks like replication, mirroring, etc.

    In our company, we have an e-commerce application that has two servers running SQL 2012:

    SQLSERVER1 - production

    SQLSERVER2 - replica (in case something happens with SQLSERVER1)

    We want to replicate data in real time from SQLSERVER1 to SQLSERVER2, like SQL Mirroring. The idea is to prevent data loss in case of something bad happens with SQLSERVER1, if we loose an order that is already paid by the customer we are doomed.

    We are aware of the several methods to implement this using SQL Server tools like replication via log shipping, mirroring, always on, etc, but we have this system administrator guy that insists that we should use Hyper-V replication since both machines are virtual machines.

    I have read some articles about Hyper-V and from what I understand, it is not good for SQL Server replication or applications that changes data a lot. Seems like this kind of replication is ideal for a WEB server or application server where the changes occur when we release a new version of the application, not for database server.

    What are the opinions of the experts here in the forum?

    Is someone using this type of Hyper-V replication for database servers?

    Thanks for your comments!

  • Hyper-V in particular isn't something I've used, but other clone softwares are things I've witnessed. The are avoided like the plague simply because the database is basically trasferred in an open state into another location and then the target has to recover that database.

    In short, don't do it. The internals of SQL Server don't play nice with external cloning software, because of the state of the files after cloning on a server not expecting it. If your sysadmin needs more information, point him towards these keywords in google to go witness all the trouble tickets across the forums: "SQL Server" database clone recovery error

    Add a few variations on that for more of an eyeful.


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  • Yes, Hyper-V is not ideal in simple it do not understand the transactions level of granularity in SQL server which needed protect the data loss and point in-time recoveries.

    Since you are SQL Server 2012 I would recommend using Always On.. Mirroring is marked for deprecated for future releases, but you can still use either of them and configure in synchronous mode to avoid data loss.

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