Dear All

We have implemented BES 5.0 with SQL Mirroring using Double Take for the high availability aspect. The primary BES is located in one datacentre and the secondary in another. We do not use the built in BES 5 HA as it didn't meet our requirements.

My question is around the BES mirroring piece - we have all this configured however when running BES Configuration Manager there is an option to test the SQL Database Mirror connection and that fails. I can see in the event log of the mirror DB server that the BES server attempts to open the database but fails. The error is 'Failed to open the explicitly specified database'. Is this expected if the primary database is still running?. I am sure that you should not be able to open a SQL mirrored DB whilst it is still the mirror and this can be proven by trying to run SQL Management Studio on the mirror and attempting to open the mirrored BES config database.

Could someone also explain when BES will actually look to the Mirror DB, how long does the primary DB have to be non contactable for?

Many thanks

Phil - aka BESNumptee

Replying to myself. I think this is by design as expected. Actually reading the tab states that this panel is for informtional purposes only a connection to the primary DB was made. So I'm assuming the test will only work when the mirror becomes the active DB. Can anyone confirm this?

Thanks

Phil

Confirmed. Just going through this myself. You can use netstat on the BES to see that it is connected to the mirror server if you do a SQL failover.