Best Strategies – SharePoint Disaster Recovery in SharePoint 2016/13/07

This post will help you to get knowledge about disaster recovery options and recovery supported technologies for SharePoint Server 2016 and SharePoint 2013 farm if there is a disaster.

The disaster recovery is the facility to recover from a scenario in which the primary data center that hosts a SharePoint Server farm is unable to continue to operate. Whatever is the nature of the issue and its reason, the data center failure is remarkable enough to perform the process mentioned in your organization’s disaster recovery plan. In other words, you can keep a fully operational farm into production using computer resources, located in a data center which is not affected by the event.

SharePoint Server 2016 and SQL Server 2014 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or SQL Server 2016, and SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or SQL Server 2012 offers configuration and content recovery options that can perform the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) that are needed if there is a disaster in your business.

Overview – Disaster Recovery Strategy for SharePoint

In general, the disaster recovery strategy for a SharePoint Server farm must be efficient so that it can fulfill your organization’s business requirements these are Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO and RPO requirements are extracted by observing the downtime cost to the organization if there is a disaster.

The Downtime cost varies majorly between and within organizations, mainly due to the distinctive belongings of downtime. Commonly, the Business size is the main factor. Though there are many other factors. The process of setting a measure is finding the nature and implications of the failure. Thus, a failure of a critical application may result in the following types of losses:

• There may be a loss of service of the application. The impact of downtime varies according to the application and the business.
• There may be a loss of data. The potential loss of data is because of system outage can have serious legal and financial impact.

In maximum situations, the SharePoint products are only the application which is recovered when the data center is shutdown that is like a disaster. Despite this let’s concentrate on the ways to recover your SharePoint Server 2016 farm at another location.

Despite the type and scale of a disaster, recovery includes the use of a standby data center by which you can also recover the farm.

 Also Read: Common Reasons for Corruption in SharePoint Server

Recovery Options in Standby Data Center

The Standby data centers are needed when you are unable to recover the local redundant systems and backups due to the outage at the primary data center. The time and immediate action for replacement farm up and running at a different location is often known as a hot, warm, or cold standby. These farm recovery data centers are as follows:

• Cold standby:  A secondary data center that can supply availability within hours or days.
• Warm standby: A secondary data center that can supply availability within minutes or hours.
• Hot standby: A secondary data center that can provide availability within seconds or minutes.

Cold Standby Recovery Strategy

In this type of strategy, recovery is done by setting up a new farm at a new location, (preferably by using a scripted deployment), and restoring backups. Secondly, you can recover by restoring the farm using a backup solution like System Center 2016 – Data Protection Manager (DPM) or System Center 2012 – Data Protection Manager (DPM). The System Center Data Protection Manager protects your data at the computer operating system level and helps you restore each server individually.

Demerit: It is the slowest option to recover.

Warm Standby Recovery Strategy

In this disaster recovery scenario, you can create a warm standby environment by forming a duplicate farm at the substitute data center and make sure that it is updated regularly by using full and incremental backups of the primary farm.

Demerit: It can be very expensive and time-consuming to maintain.

Virtual Warm Standby Environments Solution

It offers a workable and cost-effective option for a warm standby recovery solution. So, you can develop virtual images of the production servers and ship virtual images to the standby data center. Ensure, that the virtual images are created are sufficient to give the level of farm configuration and content freshness that you should have for recovering the farm. Moreover, at the secondary location, there should be an accessible environment in which you can easily configure and connect the images for the re-creation of the farm environment.

Hot Standby Recovery Strategy

In this recovery scenario, first, you set up a failover farm in the standby data center so that it can undertake production operations immediately after the primary farm goes offline. The characteristic of an environment which have separate failover farm should be followed:

1. You should maintain a separate configuration database and the SharePoint Central Administration website content database on the failover farm.
2. Do all customizations must be located on both farms.
3. The operating system, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server software updates must be used for both farms, for maintaining a consistent configuration in both farms.
4. You can copy content databases of SharePoint Server to the failover farm by applying asynchronous mirroring, asynchronous commit on an availability group replica, or log-shipping.

 

Demerit: It can be very expensive for both, configure and maintain.

Note:

The SQL Server mirroring is only used to copy databases to a single mirror server, but you can log-ship to multiple secondary servers. It is recommended that you should ignore this feature in new development work. Plan to change applications that currently use this feature.

The availability of network bandwidth and latency are main considerations when you are using a failover approach for disaster recovery. For this, you should consult with your SAN vendor to determine whether you can use SAN replication or another supported mechanism to provide the hot standby level of availability across data centers.

Redundant Service Application

The services which can be run cross-farm, for these you run a separate services farm that can be obtained from both the primary and the secondary data centers.

In case, services that cannot be run cross-farm,  to give availability for the services farm itself, the strategy for providing redundancy across data centers for a service application changes. The condition required for this strategy to be employed depends on whether:

• There should be a business value in running the service application in the disaster recovery farm when it is not being used.
• The databases linked with the service application can be log-shipped, asynchronously mirrored, or replicated using asynchronous commit.
• The service application should run against read-only databases.

Requirements of System for Recovery

The systems must fulfill the following minimum requirements:

• Check operating system version and all updates.
• SQL Server versions and all updates.
• SharePoint Server versions and all updates.

Despite, of above requirements, farm recovery time will also be affected by the availability of facilities and infrastructure components. Ensure that the following requirements are also meeting:

• The power, cooling, network, directory, and SMTP are redundant.
• Select a switching mechanism; whether DNS or hardware load balancing, are sufficient to meet your needs.

Alternative Solution

After having a discussion on SharePoint Disaster Recovery for SharePoint 2016 it seems that you should have sound technical knowledge. So, there is an alternate solution Aryson SharePoint Server Recovery. It is an advanced SharePoint Server Recovery tool is capable to repair SharePoint database which is corrupt or inaccessible due to various reasons. It can restore SharePoint Server data like triggers, functions, rules, lists, documents, etc.

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