1. AlwaysOn Availability Groups
How to Setup and Configure using Best Practices

2. About me Morgan Jung SQL Database Administrator with One Command
9 Years experience with SQL Server, Sybase, and MySQL
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3. Agenda AlwaysOn Availability Groups Overview Benefits Requirements
Best Practices
Troubleshoot
Demo: Setup and Configure

4. AlwaysOn Classification
Microsoft’s new catch phrase introduced in 2012
Availability Groups
Failover clustered instances (FCI)
Database mirroring
Log-shipping
Replication

5. Availability Groups Synchronization modes Replicas Synchronous
Asynchronous
Replicas
Supports up to 9 secondary replicas (5 in 2012)
Up to 3 replicas can be synchronous
1 Primary replica
2 Secondary replicas
Up to 2 replicas can be automatic failover partners

6. Benefits Redundancy High availability Offload reporting & DW loads
Offload backups
Copy only full backups
No differential
Local storage

7. Automatic Page Repair Errors: 823, 824, and 829
Requests a clean page from replica
Asynchronous repair
Integrity checks
Still run physical_only on primary

8. Replication Replication
Publisher: Supports automatic redirect on failover
Subscriber: Supports failover*
Transactional replication configured the subscriber’s listener name
Merge subscribers require additional manual work
Distributor: Role failover not supported

9. Requirements Windows Cluster SQL Enterprise Edition
Recommend Windows 2012
SQL Enterprise Edition
Replica Initialization
Listener (Optional)
Network Name
IP Address (Static)

10. Checklist Items Kerberos Service Broker SSISDB Monitoring
All SQL Servers need to use the same service account
Service Broker
SSISDB
Monitoring
SQL Agent jobs

11. Best Practices Disk layout (Please!) Same hardware
Same SQL Server features are installed on all replicas
Use a Quorum witness
Windows cluster
Latest patches
Perform a planned failover
Create a failover document

12. Best Practices (Cont.) Run performance tests Security policy
On primary and secondary replicas
Security policy
AD policy
Local policy
Perform volume maintenance tasks (Instant file initialization)
Perform a planned failover
Create a failover document

13. Worker Threads Monitor Max Worker Threads
When set to 0 (default) SQL calculates the max thread based on CPU count
Mirroring process uses at least 2 threads per database
Number of CPUs
32-bit computer
64-bit computer
<= 4 processors
256
512
8 processors
288
576
16 processors
352
704
32 processors
480
960

14. Noteworthy Manual failovers of asynchronous databases
Snapshot isolation
Index page splits
Only 1 mirror endpoint per SQL instance
Watch out for log backups

15. Troubleshoot SQL Server error log Windows Event Viewer Cluster log
Primary and secondary replica
Windows Event Viewer
Cluster log
Database(s) unavailable – Check the cluster
Search Exchange forums

16. Demo Setup AlwaysOn Backup Restore Listener 172.30.201.150 Group: AG1
Listener: AG1-List
Setup and test read routing
DMVs
Quorum votes
AlwaysOn information

17. Monitoring Perfmon Dashboard 3rd-party monitoring solution
Idera
SQL Sentry

18. References AlwaysOn Checklist Overview on AlwaysOn Availability Groups
Brentozar.com/go/alwayson
Overview on AlwaysOn Availability Groups
Replication with AlwaysOn