Question :
This is about on premise, regular SQL Server 2014, Standard edition.
This is NOT about SQL Azure. The only part of Azure in this conversation is Azure Blog Storage, as a transport for some bits (SQL backups and logs)
Scenario:
Primary SQL Server is in data center 1.
Backup is in data center 2.
In SQL 2014, is it possible to use the “backup to url/azure blob storage” to be the log shipping pipeline?
We like the idea of backup of db and logs to azure blob storage. Great, easy, automatic off site storage of backups.
Would be awesome to use the same pipeline for log shipping to backup db server.
Doable?
(Notes: Neither server is member of a domain. These are two stand alone servers, with no AD or other relationship with each other.)
Answer :
Yes, but only manually – Azure Blob Storage isn’t integrated into the log shipping wizards. You would need to do your own backups to Azure Blob Storage, and then have the secondary server(s) restore from ABS using the same certificates.
When other shops have done similar projects with AWS’s S3 storage (writing their SQL Server backups there using 3rd party tools), I’ve seen them either log backups to a text file that the other SQL Servers check for backup files, or log entries into a centrally accessible table (like SQL Azure or Amazon RDS) and fetch the backup file names from there.