Network Considerations For Mirroring

I would like to know people's thoughts on any special network considerations to take for mirroring and the logic behind them. Is it best to segregate mirroring traffic from other network traffic? Use a VLAN? Dedicate one NIC for mirroring and the other for general network traffic or just aggregate the two and let both types of traffic share the bandwidth?

I haven't seen much in this area from Microsoft's best practices and wanted to know what those who have implemented it have done and why. There are pros and cons for each method: Letting everything share one massive pipe with load balancing vs. trying to segregate traffic in some way so that general network connections etc. do not impact the mirroring capability.

I look forward to hearing from you.

-M-

Hi M

Answer to your question depends on the following:

1. how much cash you got.

2. How busy your databases are going to be.

3. How busy and fast your network is?

Database mirroring can be treated like clustering where servers are next to each other and connected on dedicated connection. Believe me I have done this

On the other hand I have used mirroring where servers in two different data centers (safety OFF).

Quite difficult for an outsider to give any definite answers without proper analysis.

Best thing to do is to configure mirroring and run stuff like re-indexing and may be do some bulk inserts and also do some testing by users and see if the performance is acceptable.

regards

Jag

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If you havent already got information you require..

Read this , the article discusses about DBM setup under various network topologies

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/technologies/dbm_best_pract.mspx

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Hi,

I have a typical situation as mentioned below:

Please let me know how to handle and let me know what to use: Clustering or Database Mirroring.

Clustering software is installed on N nodes. The node that is used for client access is controlled by a quorum. There are two quorum implementation strategies.
"Windows Server 2003 has two types of cluster quorum models: the traditional shared quorum failover cluster, which uses a shared disk to hold the cluster state, and the local quorum or Majority Node Set (MNS) cluster, which uses a local disk on each node to hold the cluster state. SQL Server 2005 supports both cluster quorum models."
Our application would simply need to be configured to point to one virtual IP address provided by the cluster.

Please help me for setting up this.

Thanks