Patching a mirrored farm with minimal downtime

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(Cross-posted from the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog)

For administrators of large SharePoint server farms, a newly-published article describes how to update server farms that use database mirroring, while incurring minimal perceived downtime for users. This solution is for enterprise customers who have high-availability needs and infrastructure. This article describes a step-by-step process for Office SharePoint Server farms that incorporate SQL Server mirroring. You can achieve similar results on Office SharePoint Server farms that are set up in a clustered server environment.

In brief, the solution requires that you:

  • Disable mirroring and set the mirror databases to read-only.
  • Route network and database traffic to the read-only databases
  • Apply software updates to the offline servers.
  • Route network and database traffic to the updated servers.
  • Apply software updates to the secondary farm.
  • Re-enable mirroring and set the mirrored databases to read/write.

To read the full solution, see Configure a server farm for minimal downtime during software updates.