Prerequisites for Configuring Log Shipping

1)      Both SQL & OS Editions and Versions should be at same level on all participating servers

2)      Express Edition doesn’t supports SQL server Logshipping

3)      The user who configures the Logshipping must be member of sysadmin server role

4)      SQL Server and SQL Server agent services must be configured under windows authentication account with sysadmin permissions on all participating server

5)      Recommended to have unique logon account for both SQL Server and SQL Server agent services

6)      The Logon account must have at least local administrator privileges to carry out the administrative tasks

7)      SQL Server port (1433) must be opened at network level for communication between the both servers

8)      Sharing ports must be enabled on both production & DR servers for log shipping

9)      Create shared network share on both Primary and secondary servers

10)   The backup and restore directories in your log shipping configuration must follow these requirements.

For the backup job, read/write permissions to the backup directory are required on the following:

·         The SQL Server service account on the primary server instance. 

·         The SQL Server Agent account on the primary server instance. 

·         For the copy job, read permissions to the backup directory and write permissions to the copy directory are required by the service account of the copy job. By default, this is the SQL Server Agent account on the secondary server instance.

For the restore job, read/write permission to the copy directory are required by the following:

·         The SQL Server service account on the secondary server instance. 

·         The SQL Server Agent account on the secondary server instance. 

11)   SQL service log on accounts must be same on both Environments.

12)   Database being log shipped must be in Full recovery model or Bulk logged recovery model. The simple recovery model is not supported

13)   Should not run any maintenance plan or backup job against log shipped databases since that would break Logshipping chain

14)   Logshipping configuration can be done with in trusted domain computers or work group computers

15)   Recommended to have the same Drive Space capacity in fact more space of secondary server considering the data growth in future

16)   Ensure you do not hardcode your server name in your application connection connecting the databases. Create in a such way that you can switch easily to the database servers and take advantage of log shipping

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