These questions are focused on availability, more next week on performance and tuning. I helped write some of the Mirror questions on the v1.0 MCM exam which must be well retired by now, and I must admit they were pretty obscure. Learn those failure conditions and resources/threads required on the MSDN articles and MCM videos!
HA – Availability
1. Define the difference between RPO and RTO ?
2. What are the key components of an SLA ?
3. What are the key characteristics of an SLO (or Service Level Target) (eight possible)
4. Name five different types of disaster, what they affect and recommended mitigation steps
5. Articulate the key feature differences between Log shipping and Replication
6. When and why would you use Failover clustering instead of Mirroring
7. What would be a blocker to using failover clustering (name three blockers)
8. A major web site wants “zero down time” and “zero data loss” and “zero user impact”. What SQL Server technology will achieve this by itself?
9. How can developers ensure that mirroring and always on do not affect the user experience when they failover WRT uncommitted transactions?
10. Now that you have answered (9) do you want to change your answer to (8) 😉
11. What is the max failover time with a mirror with default settings?
12. What types of failures can cause this?
13. Explain the difference between “Looks Alive” and “is Alive” in WFC?
14. How does this change in SQL 2012?
15. Windows 2008 cluster components no longer need the HCL, but what “certification” do they need?
16. A customer has added a new disk to the cluster. Do they need to rerun the validation tool to maintain supported status?
17. Should a cluster use the vendor MPIO driver or the MS MPIO ?
18. Any special anti-virus considerations for clustering? name them
19. There is a three node cluster with a single instance. How many nodes should be removed as possible owners before patching?
20. Why might log shipping offer better performance for a data warehouse workload than mirroring?
21. What’s the maximum number of databases that it is recommended to Mirror on a single instance?
22. How many additional threads does a mirror consume on the principal per database mirrored?
23. At what level of hardware does enterprise edition offer more redo threads with mirroring ?
24. What OS and SQL editions can be supported with the SVVP ?
25. Is VMWARE or Hyper-V “Snapshot” technology supported by MS ?
26. What does the RHS.exe do in Windows 2008 clustering ?
