AlwaysOn AG
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Build a SQL Cluster Lab Part 4
You are going to create a SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance in Part 4 of our series on how to build a SQL Cluster Lab. The FCI will only be installed on Node1 and Node2. FCIs require shared storage so you will make your domain controller an iSCSI target. Last you will create your FCI…
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Build a SQL Cluster Lab Part 3
You are going to create a multi-subnet Availability Group in Part 3 of our series on how to build a SQL Cluster Lab. First you give the Cluster Name Object rights in Active Directory and then install your AG. You will also ensure the AG endpoints are using the dedicated network created for them in…
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Build a SQL Cluster Lab Part 2
You are going to create a Windows Cluster in Part 2 of our series on how to build a SQL Cluster Lab. You will run cluster validation followed by creating the Windows Server Failover Cluster. In addition, you configure the Cluster Networks and a File Share Witness. Here are links to the other articles in…
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Build a SQL Cluster Lab Part 1
This article is Part 1 in a series of articles showing how to build a SQL Cluster Lab. It covers building a Windows Cluster in Hyper-V that supports both Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances. Once you build the environment, you can use it for training purposes, POCs, or the testing of features and functions…
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MSDTC Best Practices with an Availability Group
In this article we are going to look at some guidelines and MSDTC best practices with an Availability Group. Please note that some of these recommendations change if you are deploying a Failover Cluster Instance. If you are using the MSDTC (BizTalk, Linked Servers, etc.) and hosting the databases in an Availability Group, there are…
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MSDTC Supported Configurations
The MSDTC Configuration Conundrum MSDTC configuration is not as straight forward as you might think. It’s a different choice if you are using a local MSDTC, clustered MSDTC, on-premises, Azure, Failover Cluster, or Availability Group. Every one of those variables leads you down a different path with different choices. The goal of this article is…
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Read-Scale Availability Group Setup
What is a Read-Scale Availability Group? A Read-Scale Availability Group is a Clusterless Availability Group. It’s sole purpose and design is to scale out a read workload. More importantly is what it is not. It is NOT a High Availability or Disaster Recovery solution. Since this design has no cluster under it, you lose things…
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Domain Independent Cluster and Availability Group
What is a Domain Independent Cluster? Did you know that you can have a Windows cluster that is a domain independent cluster and run a SQL Server Availability Group on top of it? The technology has been around for a while, but a lot of DBAs are not aware of it. Why? All the glory…
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How to Upgrade an AG Cluster to Windows 2016
Starting in Windows Server 2012 R2 you now have a way to upgrade a cluster to Windows 2016. The best part is it’s not an OS upgrade, but a rebuild. The magic is that you can join a Windows 2016 server to a Windows 2012 R2 cluster. You can upgrade your cluster with as little…
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Sync SQL Logins and Jobs
In this post I’ll point you to some options to sync SQL logins and then I’ll demo my favorite option in a video. If you are using Availability Groups or Mirroring you know you need to sync SQL logins and jobs among replicas. What are your options to sync SQL Logins and maybe even jobs? …
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Fix a Network Binding Order Warning
Network Binding Order Warning One of the more common errors I see when setting up a Windows cluster (usually in preparation for a SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance or a SQL Server Availability Group) is regarding an incorrect network binding order. You will see this presented as a warning in the Cluster Validation Report. There…
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Change Availability Group Endpoint Port
Let’s say you have a port conflict and need to change the port on your Availability Group endpoint. How can we accomplish this? The first step is to change the port on the endpoint itself. Note that as soon as you do this the replica on which you are running it will no longer be…