I've been working with a customer on a project that started small, and has grown significantly. It is a retail environment, and we are taking live transaction data from the POS system, and loading into SQL server for reporting and online presentation.
My experience has been mostly with smaller SQL dbs, nothing involving multiple servers.
The SQL database file is started at less than 6GB, and is now ~25GB 6 months later, and will only grow. They currently have a single SQL 2012 Server, with nightly full backups to a NAS.
They bought a second physical server to be a standby / DR back up in a second physical location. The IT Manager quit before they set this server up, and they have asked me to step in to complete the project.
What would be the best strategy to ensure DR and high availability given this set up?
My initial plan is to install the second SQL into a VM on the new hardware then set up replication from the first SQL. Would this be good enough to eliminate the nightly full back up? Can I then just do backups on the VM? What about clustering?
Thank you for any suggestions.