Figure 1: Log Shipping Error Message

Log shipping does not have automatic fail over out of the the box, but you can pretty easily write some T-SQL to run the proper SQL Server Agent jobs on the primary and secondary server, check the status of the secondary database, and then recover the secondary database and bring it online on the new server. Doing all of this can semi-automate your fail over process.

Here are the basic steps for doing the final Production migration:

1. Stop the application(s) that are using the primary database(s) on the primary server
2. Run the LSBackup Agent job on the primary server for each log shipped database
   1. EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job N’LSBackup_AdventureWorks2014′;
3. Run the LSCopy Agent job on the secondary server for each log shipped database
   1. EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job N’LSCopy_LABDB03_AdventureWorks2014′;
4. Run the LSRestore Agent job on the secondary server for each log shipped database
   1. EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job N’LSRestore_LABDB03_AdventureWorks2014′;
5. Check the recent history of the log shipped databases on the secondary server
   1. Query the log_shipping_monitor_history_detail table in msdb
6. Restore each log shipped database on the secondary WITH RECOVERY
   1. RESTORE DATABASE AdventureWorks2014 WITH RECOVERY;
7. Redirect the applications to the new database server

Steps two through six can usually be done in just a few minutes, depending on how many databases you have, how much transaction log activity has occurred, and your network and storage infrastructure performance.

Additional Resources

My new Pluralsight course, SQL Server: Upgrading and Migrating to SQL Server 2016 has just been published. This is my eleventh course for Pluralsight, but the complete list of my courses is here.

Building on this online course is a new three day class, IEUpgrade: Immersion Event on Upgrading SQL Server, taught by myself and Tim Radney. The first round of this course will be taught in Chicago from October 11-13, 2017.

Finally, I will be presenting a half-day session called Migrating to SQL Server 2017 at the PASS Summit 2017 in Seattle, WA from October 31- November 3, 2017.

Here is a link to the complete series about upgrading SQL Server.

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