High availability of the SQL Server databases

The XProtect services store data in different SQL Server databases:

To provide redundancy for the SQL Server databases, you must ensure that the services and components can access their databases. Depending on your needs, you can consider different high-availability options:

Always On availability groups

Always On availability groups (AGs) help protect databases by keeping copies of the databases on other hosts, called replicas, which can take over if the primary host fails.

Milestone XProtect cannot be installed or upgraded using an MS-SQL database enrolled in a database mirroring session or an availability group because some operations cannot run on this kind of database. Remove the database from the availability group or mirroring session during the installation or upgrade. After the installation or upgrade is complete, the database can be enrolled in a mirroring session or an availability group again.

To learn more about AGs, see What is an Always On availability group?

Failover cluster instances

Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) provide high availability for the entire SQL Server instance, ensuring that all components, including databases and jobs, move to another host if a failure occurs.

To learn more about FCIs, see Always On failover cluster instances (SQL Server).

Log shipping

With SQL Server Log shipping, you can copy the transaction log file from one SQL Server instance to another.

To learn more about log shipping, see About log shipping (SQL Server).