Disaster recovery scenario with SQL Server and Log Shipping

[pmillard5000]

Hi there,

We are running backup and replication 8.

We have a scenario where we have to protect a SQL server in a disaster recovery scenario.

Our backup config is to have an incremental backup running a 1 am every morning, with application aware log shipping to ship logs every 1 hour to our backup repository.
We also have a replica backup that runs once the incremental has finished.

What we are looking to do is document and test our disaster recovery for if the original server should ever die on us.

What we cant seem to be able to find is a way to replay the SQL logs into a different server, preferably the replica we have created each night.

Is this possible or is the only way to recover a server like this is to do a full image-based restore and then replay the logs back the server that has been recovered?

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Pete

[foggy]

Hi Peter, you can perform failover to replica VM and then restore database to this VM to any available point in time.

[pmillard5000]

So once the test is complete how would we go back to the original production vm?
The replica is sitting on slow spinning media and the production is on SSD's

[foggy]

In case of real DR, you can simply failback to the original VM. If it is a test, I'd recommend to turn on the replica in an isolated environment instead of failover, to avoid affection of production VM. After the test you can just turn off the replica, all the changes occurred inside it during the test will be discarded during the next replication job run.