An overview of our Deployment & what happened when the DB went down.

Hello all,

This is my first blog post, but I hope to continue these in the future as situations arise, to help others with their SEP Deployments.

At my Organization we currently have 2 SEP Managers (MR4 MP1), that are replicating between each other. Our primary site is running on a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 Machine and has its DB on a separate server running SQL 2005 SP2 on a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 machine. Our Secondary Site is on a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 Machine running SQL 2005 SP2 on the same machine. These Sites are connected over a DS3 WAN Link approx. 200 Mi apart.

This past weekend the blade that is running the primary sites SQL DB failed, and the SEP Manager informed all of our administrators approx. 5-10 min prior to our other monitoring solution. I know that this looks bad for our primary server monitoring system, however SEP alerted us to a Database Down incident first, which got the ball rolling, and it also pointed out that we need to fine tune our primary monitoring software. So kudos to SEP!
(Oh, and after the DB was brought back up, SEP recovered without a problem)

The Big Picture::
We have had intermittent little problems with SEP over the past year or so, but now things have pretty much smoothed out. We started on MR1 and we thought we had made a mistake in choosing SEP, that had proved wrong as MR2 came along. We had many minor issues with MR2 that most everyone probably experienced, we skipped over MR3 because at the time when we were ready to upgrade, I had called support and they said MR4 was going to be out within the month. So we waited for MR4, on MR4 things were not going so well to start with. In the past we had been replicating from our HQ site (DB on a SQL Server) to an Embedded DB on our second site, which worked well up though MR2. However we could not get this working on MR4, and we did not want to wait on support any longer because we had a hole in security due to no A/V, we opted to put the secondary site's DB on a SQL server as well. We had some problems from there with updates, we were receiving errors stating that MicroDefs for an MR2 client were not updating, unfortunately once again support was no help, so I tried re-adding an MR2 install package to the manager, and the errors stopped. So now as it stands today our SEP deployment is working 100% and we could not be happier.

As time goes on if more issues, or perhaps when we come across little tid bits of good information, on top of my forum posting I'll add to my blog, in hopes that others will benefit.

If you have any ?s I'm always willing to respond, I'm no expert by any means but if I can help I certainly will.

Ty