In this post I am going to outline my environment and then walk through the process of setting up Database Mirroring.  This will include the configurations, backups, restores and verification process.  Let’s jump in.

My test environment consists of two separate VM’s running VM Workstation with Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise named appropriately Principal and Mirror. The SQL Server and SQL Server Agent Services accounts are running as domain users (DOMAIN\User). Windows Firewall is OFF for the sake of this example.

I created a database on the Principal SQL Server instance and named it TestMirror. The recovery model is set to FULL RECOVERY.

1st step: Issue a full backup of the database.

BACKUP DATABASE TestMirror TO DISK = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL 
Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Backup\Backup.bak';

2nd step: Issue a transaction log backup of the database.

BACKUP LOG TestMirror TO DISK = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL 
Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Backup\Backup.trn';

Below are the two files in the file system:

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