Mirroring two PC's

[dwest100]

I am running windows 2000 advanced server as a web server. In the PC I have a RAID controller mirroring two drives. I hot swap one of the drives each night with a fresh drive and firebox the swapped out drive. That serves as my backup system.

Now I need to duplicate that server, RAID hardware and all, and have it kick in if the main server has a hardware failure such as a motherboard etc.

I can do this with a second IP for the duplicate server and set A records pointing to it in my DNS records.

But, and here is my question, how do I RAID the two PC's together so that the secondary PC always has the same info on it's raid drives as the the primary PC?

Thanks for any insight...

 

[ricpinto]

If you have the 2 server exactly alike then just transfer the 2 HDD to the other server without configuring your RAID controller and you're done. Actually the RAID config info was written to the HDDs as well, the purpose is, in case of RAID controller failure you can just change the controller then you can roll again.

What about "Network Load Balancing Clusters", did you consider it already and gave up?

 

[dwest100]

Thanks for the reply. What do you mean by "transfer"? Do you mean physically? If so, I'm aware I can do that but I need the secondary server to automatically kick in so things will keep running if I am not present.

Please clarify for me if you don't mind.

As for NLB, from what I've read, it seems to require a shared RAID array that both PC's can access. That defeats my purpose. What if the Shared drive controller fails?

I wanted two duplicate PC's (each with a mirrored RAID pair for redundancy on each machine) so that one would take over immediately if the other failed. I just need to have the two PC's maintain synchronization of their drives with each other at all times. Hence my original question of RAID'ing two PCs.

So, any notions of how to achieve the synchronization?

All thoughts welcome!!
DW