System Requirements

The servers that participate in log shipping must meet the minimum SQL Server 2005 hardware requirements; see the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Books Online. Additionally, certain hardware infrastructure requirements are necessary to deploy log shipping.

Network

The log shipping SQL Servers must be networked such that the primary server has access to the backup folder, and the standby server has access to copy the transaction-log files from the backup folder and into its local folder. Also, the monitor server must be able to connect to both the primary and standby servers. To improve copying the transaction-log file in a very active log-shipping environment, place the participating servers on their own network segment and different network cards. Log shipping will function with any feasible network speed, but on a slow network the transaction-log file transfer will take longer, and the standby server will likely be further behind with the primary server.

Identical Capacity Servers

The primary and standby servers should have identical performance capacity, so that in a failover the standby server can take over and provide the same level of performance and user experience. Additionally, some organizations have service-level agreements (SLA) to meet.

Storage

To mitigate the risk of storage failure becoming a single point of failure, the primary and standby servers should not share the same disk system. Unlike a Windows failover cluster that requires a shared-disk infrastructure, log shipping has no such requirements. In a disaster recovery scenario configuration, the primary and standby servers would be located at a distance from each other and would be unlikely to share the same disk system. Moreover, when identifying the performance specification for the disk systems, consider the log-shipping IO activities.

Monitor Server

The monitor server should be on separate hardware from the primary or standby servers to prevent a failure to bring down the monitor server and lose monitoring capabilities. The monitor server incurs low activity as part of log shipping and may be deployed on another production server. Additionally, a single monitor server can monitor more than one log-shipping environment.

Software

The supported SQL Server editions for log shipping are the following:

• SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition

• SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition

• SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition

Also, the log-shipping servers should have identical case-sensitivity settings, and the log-shipping databases must use either full or bulk-logged recovery models.