I will possibly be setting up a small network for a family member this summer. Right now I am in the planning stage of determining the best setup for this network. The office is a small dental practice. The network will be done in a two part process. The first part will be implementing the entire network infrastructure and only installing two front desk machines and a doctor's computer in an office. A few months later two or three workstations will be added to the operatories to support chair-side charts, as well as digital x-Rays. My overall goal with this network is to be as simple as possible, yet still perform well and remain stable.
I am trying to figure out an affordable, yet effective high availability setup for this network. Basically what I am trying to figure out is how I can do some sort of server replication and failover in case of a hardware failure. The server will be running DHCP, DNS, AD, DC, File and Print, and a database for the practice management software. I''m not looking for hardware recommendations, but I do plan to get hardware that is slightly overkill to ensure optimal performance and stability down the road. Despite redundant power supplies and raid arrays, I'm worried about the server bringing the practice to a hault with a hardware or software failure. The reason I am posting this thread is that I am seeking help to determine a simple low-cost fail-over setup. I feel that doing a dual node and SAN setup is overkill, as well as too expensive for this type of network.
What I am looking for is similar to that of a Raid 1 array between two servers. I believe this would be more like an Active/Passive type fail-over setup. Basically have everything on the first node copied to the second (backup) node. I'm not sure if this is a built-in function within Windows or if it would require some type of software for the replication. One solution I have researched that seems slightly complicated would be to use Hyper-V Replica. I'm not totally sure I understand how it works yet, but I believe that I could essentially do what I have asked for above, but having the practice management database in a VM with a replicated VM on the second node. Then I could have DNS, DHCP, and those other services set up as fail-over between the two nodes. I have not really done much with virtualization, so this may actually be a simple set up, but to me it seems kind of complicated. I am trying to avoid using a SAN at all costs. Remember, keep it simple!
One last point to make is that I am under the impression that I don't necessarily have to have the same hardware in both servers. I'm definitely going to have a new server ordered for the primary server, but I was thinking of picking up a refurbished server for the second node. A total budget has not be determined at this point, but I would say it's safe to assume that this HA setup needs to remain around or under $4-5,000. I would also like to point out that most of the time, I will be doing support remotely for the network.
Please let me know what you think would be the ideal way to achieve this high availability setup. Thank you! :D