We have a 3.5 TB DB which is already involved in log shipping to two different servers, as one will be in restore sate only and one will be in stand by mode which helps for reporting needs. All three instances are SQL Server 2005.
Now we want to implement log shipping to third server (SQL Server 2008) without downtime. We restored a full backup of primary db on the 2008 server and it took 2 hours to restore and later on we took a differential back up to of primary (since we have too many log backups which run every 15 mins) and restored it and started log shipping. Here it fails by skipping the log file since it is looking for previous log file which is already shipped to other servers.
Finally we stopped log backups and followed the same procedure it succeeded but it took 3 hours downtime which we don’t want to do since it is a prod server. How can we implement log shipping in this scenario? Is it possible to implement with out any downtime.