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administrators. This feature will provide the tools to help mitigate downtime during
upgrades and server maintenance. For example, a secondary farm can be created and
log shipping can be used to keep it current with the production environment. DNS can
then be updated to point to the secondary environment, where all content databases
are set to read-only. The production farm can be upgraded or updated without users
accessing it. After it is complete and brought back online, DNS can be updated again to
point to the production farm. Using this approach will allow users to have full read
access to their data during the upgrade process.
SQL Mirroring
SharePoint Server 2010 supports SQL mirroring natively. This allows a farm administrator
to configure the SQL environment to mirror a SharePoint content database. Whenever a
new database is created, the SharePoint administrator will be prompted to enter the
failover server. SharePoint will then communicate with the witness server and issues are
discovered, SharePoint Server will fail over to the hot backup of the environment.
Figure 27: Configure a content database for failover database server