Active Secondary: Enabling Backup On Secondary Kevin Farlee

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

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

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

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

Log backups done on all replicas form a single log chain LSN 11 - 20 LSN 31 - 40 Replica 1 Log backup Log Backup LSN 1 - 10 LSN 21 - 30

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

DEMO Backup On Secondary

DEMO Recovery Advisor

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

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

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

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

DEMO Backup Automation

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