Building a HA and DR Solution with SQL Server 2012

sqlCat - AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups

Summary: SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups provides a unified high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) solution that improves upon legacy functionality previously found across disparate features. Prior to SQL Server 2012, several customers used database mirroring to provide local high availability within a data center, and log shipping for disaster recovery across a remote data center. With SQL Server 2012, this common design pattern can be replaced with an architecture that uses availability groups for both high availability and disaster recovery. This paper 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.

Published: June 2012

Applies to: SQL Server 2012

To review the document, please download the AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups Word document.

This topic came up recently, that we needed HA (High Availability) for one of our databases. I mentioned that SQL Server 2012 provides some very nice features in that space with AlwaysOn, but didn't have a paper/post/site readily handy to share.

This 30 page DocX looks to fit the bill. This is not a marketing type whitepaper but a much more technical and pretty detailed paper.

Here's snip from the DocX;

Introduction

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn provides flexible design choices for selecting an appropriate high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution for your application. There are multiple design patterns for building SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn HA and DR solutions. This white paper describes a solution that uses AlwaysOn Availability Groups for HA and DR. This is a solution that is based purely on non-shared storage, because each instance of SQL Server in the topology has its own copy of data, and does not need to share storage. For more information about other design choices, see SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design Patterns.

Prior to SQL Server 2012, a common HA and DR deployment architecture involved the use of database mirroring for local high availability and log shipping for remote disaster recovery. With SQL Server 2012, an availability groups solution with multiple secondaries can replace the legacy solution that uses database mirroring and log shipping.

This paper covers planning considerations and walks through the steps required to build the availability groups for high availability and disaster recovery requirements. This paper also details the steps required to recover from a disaster, and it discusses how to revert to the primary data center once the primary data center is restored.

This paper assumes a basic knowledge of AlwaysOn Availability Groups, high availability, and disaster recovery concepts. For more information about the full AlwaysOn solution feature set, see the Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Solutions Guide for High Availability and Disaster Recovery white paper. The target audience for this white paper includes operational SQL Server database administrators and technology architects. This paper is also appropriate for system administrators who collaborate with database administrators to manage Windows Server, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC), and networking.