High availability at subscribers using database mirroring

I have a mirrored database with transactional replication publishing
to 2 databases on different servers.
The amount of data written to the principal is fairly low.
The requirement is that at least one of the subscribers must be
available at all times with a latency of no greater than five minutes.
I thus have redundancy at the publisher via mirroring and at the
subscribers via multiple databases containing the same data, but I
can't see how to achieve redundancy at the distributor, since the
distribution database cannot be mirrored.
What is the recommended method of making the distributor highly
available? At this site there is reluctance to pursue SQL clustering
and to rename servers as described in BOL. At the moment it looks like
a need a set of scripts to completely set up replication from scratch
if the machine where the distributor DB lives goes offline.
Or, will Katmai offer new features to make all of the replication
components as highly available as the publisher can now be via
mirroring?
Hi Garry,
I understand that you would like to implement a high availability SQL
Server replication. You implemented Database mirroring for your principal
server and multiple databases with same data at the subscribers, but you
would like to know how to implement redundancy at the distributor since the
distribution database cannot be mirrored.
If I have misunderstood, please let me know.
I recommend that you can create a failover cluster for your distributer.
Deploy the distribution database to the virtual server instance. Also, for
your scenario, I think that it is better to use failover cluster for your
publisher since it just need two servers, but to implement a high
availability database mirroring, it needs three servers, principal server,
witness server and mirror server.
For how to setup a SQL Server 2005 failover cluster, you may refer to:
How to: Create a New SQL Server 2005 Failover Cluster (Setup)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179530.aspx
Hope this helps. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel
free to let me know.
Have a nice day!
Best regards,
Charles Wang
Microsoft Online Community Support
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