What is the difference between mirroring and replication...and does it matter which one I choose if I want to do automatic failover in BES 5.0?

thanks,
zb

I'm assuming you're talking about SQL 2005 high availability?

It matters depending on how you have SQL configured.

What version of SQL server are you using? ... and what form of SQL HA do you want to use for the BlackBerry Configuration Database?

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We are using SQL 2005 SP2 64-bit in a distributed BES 5 environment, and want to do HA so that we can have auto fail-over as well as disaster recovery (we have a remote DR site).

Personally I'm a fan of mirroring as BES 5 supports it natively and the handover process associated with it. Plus, I think its a heck of a lot easier to do deal with.

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do you know of any documentation that compares the two or that talks about why one should be used over the other? I didnt really see much about it in any of the planning guides from RIM.

If you're not satisfied with what RIM has provided in the upgrade / planning guides you won't find much else from them.

Otherwise you're looking at resources from Microsoft or Google.

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hdawg,
Were considering running two ESX servers with shared storage on a SAN and running 3-4 SQL servers as VMs (the physical servers are DELL 905 Blade server with 64 GB RAM and 4 Quad Core and about 4 NICs per server). With HA and VMotion from VMware I'm really thinking there is no need to do anything further with SQL mirroring. Any thoughts?

(yeah, I hijacked the thread for my own selfish reasons. Oops)

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War Eagle!!

The value that database mirroring would add is that you'd have a second copy of the data in case of some corruption in the principal database.

As long as you're doing regular backups of the database it wouldn't be much of an issue as you'll keep the environment more simple, so that is a bonus.

Me personally, as long as I was confident enough with proper usage with the VMWare HA config would leave it as is.

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If you have VMware configured to give you what you'd get out of database mirroring, then I agree completely. However, I believe this may have a lot to do with your ability to perform HA capabilities on a system-by-system scenario rather only in a catastrophic environment down type scenario (if you can do individual failover with your implementation at the platform level, go for it). You may sacrifice integration that RIM has with mirroring, though.

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