Double-Take woes on SQL: disabling for now

I’ve been struggling to get DoubleTake to work correctly on the SQL servers, as it was throwing a lot of activation code errors due to the multiple IPs, and NATted addresses in existence within the servers/DoubleTake, and the SIS cluster.

After some time spent with Double Take support on the phone, and thee County, we figured that in order to work towards a resolution for this, the DoubleTake Source connection need to exist in the Cluster Administrator pool. After a lot of experimenting, this seemed to work, however, since we only have Double-Take on one of the SQL servers, we are not able to assign the double take resource to have cvsql1 as one of its resources. Since this source connection is existent and alive on only one of the SQL servers, that group would refuse to move to the failover SQL server in case of failure, due to the non-cooperating the DoubleTake Source connection within that group. This effectively renders our failover mechanism useless.

Keeping DoubleTake as it is right now is also useless, as it is constantly crashing the DoubleTake service both on our end, and at the County (who support quite a few other DoubleTake districts).

This would mean that we need to purchase another license for DoubleTake to place it on cvsql1, in order to establish a correct cluster resource that will cooperate when moving over in a failover action.

For now, I will work with County and DoubleTake to make sure that we are able to establish a connection, however, I will probably keep the replication offline until we discuss whether we want to purchase another license for DoubleTake to make this work correctly.

The SQL server (CVSQL2) has been rebooted, and the new version of DoubleTake was installed on it. I was about to install some Windows updates, but due to the non-supported platforms of Citrix, I’m not sure whether the updates would have any adverse effects, so I’m a bit weary to apply those. The cluster is back to CVSQL2 as the active server.

On the bright side, do-viatron, which also has DoubleTake installed on it is replicating like a charm to the county … all 130 some GB of data.