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We are a small SaaS company that has until recently participated in Microsoft's Bizspark program. Now that our Bizspark subscription is over, we have a time-limited oppurtunity to buy discounted upgrade insurances for our SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard and Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard licenses. Now I am wondering whether or not to spend the money.

Stable hosting is mission-critical for us, and for legal reasons we cannot simply move to Winodws Azure (though I'd really love to), at least not at the moment. So we are hosting on our own root servers, one as production server, one as standby, mirroring data from the primary sql and web server. This works ok, but if the primary server should ever go down, we'll have to flip the switch very quickly so that the secondary server is used. Also, we have to take care of administration of two servers instead of just one.

So my question is: Are there any announced killer features in the sequel to SQL Server and Windows Server Standard with respect to high availability that would make the upgrade insurance a worthwile investment for us? So far I've only seen features that seem to apply to enterprise editions of SQL Server.

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This is really something you'll need to answer for yourself. There is really no way for us to be able to answer this without knowing the full picture of your environment and your company's philosophy with regards to risk and whatnot. – squillman Feb 1 at 16:37
Sqillman's point is valid, but the HADR features you would want to use in a self host environment are only available in the EE edition, so I would say you are pretty safe to leave it as is. – Jason Cumberland Feb 1 at 18:42
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closed as not constructive by pauska, Scott Pack, squillman, DJ Pon3, Holocryptic Feb 1 at 17:53

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