Forum Discussion
Is an AlwaysOn availability group an a/a cluster?
An AG is an active/passive cluster, but you can set read only for the secondary instance and thus set a load balancing. Is it then an active/active cluster?
AlwaysOn is never active/active as it is not multi-master and changes are always distributed from the current primary host to the others in the group.
You get some control over deciding upon synchronous (two-phase commit; can cause slowness subject to latency) versus asynchronous replication (reduces overhead delays but at the potential for data loss), as well as using a replica for back-up purposes, but none of this has any bearing on the active/passive relationship.
Cheers,
Lain