How to Emulate an SQL Cluster Using Mirroring

This was a pre-SQL 2012 solution (where Availability Groups would have been the obvious way to approach this problem) which involved a group of SQL databases in a mirroring configuration, whereby all databases needed to fail-over together in accordance to the active location of a specific database (in the example below, DBX) – essentially emulating a SQL cluster resource group through SQL mirroring. This below solution assumes that SQL database mail has been configured, along with any SQL operators and Active Directory email distribution groups for notification of fail-over events.

The first step is to ensure Service Broker is enabled for the msdb database, as this will be one of the requirements for the WMI queries we