Creating Server Redundancy

Question

Hello everyone and thanks for the help in advance. I am new to building servers and have set up a few Windows Server 2022 installations. I want to learn how to create redundancy in the event of one of the servers failing. I have read briefly about failover servers but am confused as to whether in the event of primary server failure, will the secondary server be replicated. Also, what if the servers are running applications like SQL Server. How do you keep the data in sync? Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hey! It depends on you goal. SQL Server has different approaches and technologies to achieve high availability. Always On Availability or Failover Cluster Instances are 2 options, which can be considered. Check for more information: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/always-on-availability-groups-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver16

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/failover-clusters/windows/always-on-failover-cluster-instances-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver16

Both options allow to achieve high availability for you DBs or instances. In case you need to make Hyper-V VMs highly available, you can use Failover Cluster with shared storage (SAN or SDS). VMs will be located on the shared storage, which is connected to multiple hosts, while Failover Cluster will handle failover process between the nodes. As for shared storage, you can use Storage Spaces Direct or StarWind VSAN. Both are software defined and can created redundant storage pool across nodes.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/storage-spaces-direct-overview

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san

Cheers,  
Alex Bykovskyi  
StarWind Software  
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Answer 2

Hello Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having query\issues related to Redundancy. First of all you need to identify which type Redundancy you will need. Failover clustering will help incase one of the Host ( Hyper-V) goes down then your VMs will be moved to another host in the Cluster. For the SQL data part I would like to invite you to have a look on below reference url : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/sql-server-business-continuity-dr?view=sql-server-ver15 --If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept as answer--