High Availability - Log Shipping

Overview

Log shipping is a means for keeping a warm standby copy of a database on a secondary server. It works by continually taking, copying, and restoring, transaction log backups from the primary server to the secondary server on a schedule. Log Shipping is available in Standard and Enterprise Edition

Pros

Very performant
Can read from the secondary database (between log restores), as long as Log Shipping is configured to keep this secondary database in "Standby" (not possible if Log Shipping is configured to keep secondary database in "Recovering" state)
Can ship logs to multiple secondary servers
Cheap
Easy to set up

Cons

Manual failover is required in the event of a failure on the primary server (to failover manually: apply uncommitted transaction logs, WITH RECOVERY)
Additional log backups not part of the scheduled log shipping backups will break the chain and stop log shipping from functioning
Data cannot be manipulated between source and target system, and it's not possible to only transfer a portion of the data
Per database level - if you want to log ship 5 databases, you have to repeat the log shipping configuration for each database (i.e. set up log shipping 5 times)
There is a lag between the log backup being taken at the primary database, and the logs being applied to the secondary database
Logs are only applied on the schedule you set - if you ship logs every 15 minutes, the secondary database can get up to 15 mins out of sync with the primary server. This can however be useful, if an erroneous data change is made at the primary, you can halt log shipping, and check the data on the secondary

Log Shipping resources

Brent Ozar blog: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2013/03/log-shipping-faq/
Setting up Log Shipping: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190640.aspx