Patching a mirrored farm with minimal downtime
(Cross-posted from the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog)
For administrators of large SharePoint server farms, a newly-published article describes how to update server farms that use database mirroring, while incurring minimal perceived downtime for users. This solution is for enterprise customers who have high-availability needs and infrastructure. This article describes a step-by-step process for Office SharePoint Server farms that incorporate SQL Server mirroring. You can achieve similar results on Office SharePoint Server farms that are set up in a clustered server environment.
In brief, the solution requires that you:
- Disable mirroring and set the mirror databases to read-only.
- Route network and database traffic to the read-only databases
- Apply software updates to the offline servers.
- Route network and database traffic to the updated servers.
- Apply software updates to the secondary farm.
- Re-enable mirroring and set the mirrored databases to read/write.
To read the full solution, see Configure a server farm for minimal downtime during software updates.
