SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide a comprehensive high availability and disaster recovery solution. Prior to SQL Server 2012, many customers used FCIs to provide local high availability within a data center and database mirroring for disaster recovery to a remote data center. With SQL Server 2012, this design pattern can be replaced with an architecture that uses FCIs for high availability and availability groups for disaster recovery business requirements. Availability groups leverage Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) functionality and enable multiple features not available in database mirroring. This paper details the key topology requirements of this specific design pattern, including asymmetric storage considerations, quorum model selection, quorum votes, steps required to build the environment, and a workflow illustrating how to handle a disaster recovery event in the new topology across participating job roles.
SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups provides a unified high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) solution. This whitepaper details the key topology requirements of this specific design pattern, including quorum configuration considerations, steps required to build the environment, and a workflow that shows how to handle a disaster recovery event in the new topology.
Using Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) for local high availability within a data center and augmenting it with Database Mirroring (DBM) for disaster recovery has been a very popular HA+DR solution. With SQL Server 2012, this FCI+DBM solution can be replaced with a FCI+AG (Availability Groups) solution. This whitepaper describes how to migrate an existing FCI+DBM solution to a FCI+AG solution.
SQL Server Failover Clustering, which includes support for both local and multisite failover configurations, is part of the SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn implementation suite, designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server. The multisite failover clustering technology has been enhanced significantly in SQL Server 2012. The multisite failover cluster architecture, enhancements in SQL Server 2012 to the technology, and some best practices to help with deployment of the technology are the primary focus of this paper.