Speaker Name 00/00/2013

Solution Requirements

A solution we are going to configure Data centerReplicaRoleAvailability modeFailover mode Primary data centerPlovdivPrimarySynchronous commitAutomatic Primary data centerSofiaSecondarySynchronous commitAutomatic Disaster recovery data center VarnaSecondaryAsynchronous commitManual PLOVDIV.inspiritbg.com SOFIA.inspiritbg.com VARNA.inspiritbg.com

Prerequisites Prerequisites, Restrictions, and Recommendations for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server) - Support for.NET 3.5 SP1 (KB ) Active Directory member servers Always prefer Windows Server 2012 over Windows Server 2008 R2! Windows Hotfixes that Support AlwaysOn Availability Groups (Windows System) – especially important for Windows Server 2008 R2! Comparable Systems for All AG Replicas Dedicated Network Adapter

WSFC setup Careful planning of Node Voting is critical Check if you need any other Patches/KBs/fixes Enable Failover Cluster role on every node Run Validation wizard for the nodes that are planned in the cluster – Exclude storage tests – Ensure the test results are green! Pay special attention to network configuration Create a WSFC Check/open all the needed ports on every node Port for SQL Server Port for DAC Port for AG EndPoints Ports for Listener

SQL Server Prerequisites Enterprise Edition of SQL Server (stand-alone) Same SQL Server service account for all instances that host availability replica Register SPN manually – setspn -A MSSQLSvc/myhost.redmond.microsoft.com:instancename accountname Same collation for all SQL Server Instances Same folders for database files Take care of objects that are stored outside of the availability databases do not fail over with the availability group – script and create them on every node Databases are in FULL Recovery model

Building the Availability Group Solution

Configuration process Enable Always ON AG for every SQL Server Instance Create AG using Wizard – Can perform backup/restores separately or leave the wizard to perform that Create AG Listener as a separate step – Read only routing

Actions

Failover and Failover Models Automatic failover (without data loss) Planned manual failover (without data loss) Forced manual failover (with possible data loss)

Monitoring AlwaysOn Group Dashboard in SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer state information New availability-group related performance counters Catalog views Dynamic management views (DMVs) An Extended Events session that tracks recent AlwaysOn DDL-related statement executions, WSFC connectivity issues, failover events, state changes, and redo-thread blocking events

AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2014 What’s being delivered Increase number of secondaries from four to eight Increase availability of readable secondaries Support for Windows Server 2012 CSV Enhanced diagnostics Main benefits Further scale out read workloads across (possibly geo-distributed) replicas Use readable secondaries despite network failures (important in geo-distributed environments) Improve SAN storage utilization Avoid drive letter limitation (max 24 drives) via CSV paths Increase resiliency of storage failover Ease troubleshooting

Enhanced Diagnostic in 2014

Complete and consistent data platform

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