Rolling changes to production databases

Question

We're currently using Clustering to do fail over for our SQL environment.

There are two servers that use the same shared drive. The SQL database is on a shared drive. This provides OS and hardware failover, however there is only a single copy of the database.

What we need is two copies of our database. We need this to allow us to roll changes into production safely. The deploy process would be to have one the web server point at one SQL Server, while we failover the other server to do the deployment. Then we would point reverse this configuration to update the first SQL Server.

Does anyone know how to use clustering to do that?

Answer 1

General rules for deployment would have kinks worked out when deploying to a TEST, QA or DEV system so there are no issues with the PROD deployment. If you are already running a cluster you can add an instance to the cluster at no licensing cost and use that as your TEST environment to iron out the deployment process. If the deployment to TEST goes south then you simply restore the database from the PROD backup, change the scripts and try again.