1. Active Secondary: Enabling Backup On Secondary
Kevin Farlee

2. Active Secondary: Enabling Backup On Secondary
Within AlwaysOn Availability Groups
Backups can be offloaded to any replica

3. Database Mirroring Backups
Backups are only allowed on Primary
Secondary cannot be leveraged for backups
Backup Workload impacts production Server

4. Active Secondary: ENABLING Backup ON SECONDARY
Backups are allowed on any replica
Primary and secondary can be leveraged for backups
Backup workload does not impact production server
Highly requested feature

5. Capabilities Backups can be done on any replica of a database
Secondary replica may be synchronous or asynchronous
Backups on primary replica still works
Log backups done on all replicas form a single log chain
Recovery Advisor makes restores simple

6. Log backups done on all replicas form a single log chain
LSN
LSN
Replica 1
Log backup
Log Backup
LSN
LSN

7. TIPS AND TRICKS Differential backups are not supported on secondary
Only Copy-only full backups are supported on secondary
The only distinction is the differential bitmap clearing
Advisable for backups to be stored centrally

8. DEMO
Backup On Secondary

9. DEMO
Recovery Advisor

10. Automated Backups How to choose which replica to use for a backup?
DBM: Only the primary would work
Now: Backups succeed on all replicas
Solution: Declarative policy

11. Declarative Policy Preference for which role to use:
Primary Only
Secondary Only
Secondary (but use Primary as fallback)
Don’t care
Relative Priority for each replica

12. Declarative Policy Logic:
Filter out replicas which are not up & online
Filter out replicas which don’t meet the policy for role
Select the highest priority replica among the remaining set
Use instance name as tie-breaker

13. Declarative Policy Policy is advisory only (NOT enforced)
Automatically used by Maintenance Plans and Log Shipping
Implemented as a system function (returns boolean)

14. DEMO
Backup Automation

15. Call to action final slide
PLACEHOLDER SLIDE SPECIFIC CTA’S WITH LINKS TO COME