We are looking at different options to allow us to stay up and running when our primary datacenter (DC1) goes down for any reason. What is the main difference in having a offsite server updated all the time using log shipping as a warm standby? (meaning we would manually redirect the DNS if DC 1 goes down or is offline to DC2).
Versus running a Hyper V cluster and setting it up to automatically fail over to the DC 2 when DC 1 is down? Although its not clear how the traffic gets redirected in real time unless we were running some sort of load balancer in the cloud?
I assume the Hyper V cluster option will provide us minimal downtime if it is automatic? Then do we even bother with sql server log shipping? It seems that these two things overlap in certain ways and we don't need to do both?
I am aware that the Hyper V cluster requires shared discs of some sort (was looking at iscsi target as a san option for server images in this case), but sql server log shipping also seems to require a witness server, so either way we have to introduce more hardware to manage.
DB is 30Gb running on SQL 2008 R2 , web is 2008 R2 (both planned to upgrade to 2012 in next few months).