Today, we are announcing two new features enabling lift and shift of Always On SQL server Failover Cluster instances (SQL FCI) from on-premises to Azure Virtual Machines: Distributed Network Name (DNN) for SQL FCI and Azure Shared Disks for SQL FCI.
SQL FCI has been commonly used for years to protect SQL Server instance in case of a failure (hardware failures, operating system failures, application, or service failures), or a planned upgrade. With SQL FCI, SQL instance will be moved to an available Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) node if the current node fails, transparent to the client or application connecting to SQL Server. SQL FCI protects from failures at the instance level through redundancy and automatic failover and fairly simplifies configuration and management for High Availability.
Azure offers many capabilities for SQL Server to maximize performance, optimize cost, reduce maintenance with SQL VM Resource Provider and achieve world class security. On Azure VMs, you can leverage these capabilities by keeping full control on the platform hosting SQL Server; including control on the VM family and size, storage configuration, SQL Server version and edition, deployment options and HADR architecture.
Previously, rehosting SQL FCI on Azure had some differences compared to on-premises as it required an Azure Load Balancer for automated failover and there was no representative of SAN (Storage Array Network) type storage on Azure. With today’s announcement, both differences are addressed by offering an exact representation of SQL FCI architecture on Azure VMs.
DNN support for SQL FCI
DNN for SQL FCI is supported with SQL Server 2019 CU2 on Windows Server 2016 and later and it enables faster failover, simplifies provisioning and maintenance, and improves robustness by removing the need for an Azure Load Balancer.
Traditionally, SQL Clients leveraged Windows Server Failover Cluster Virtual Network Name (VNN) and Virtual IP access points for SQL FCI connectivity. VNN for SQL FCI provided a unified connection point and allows applications to connect to the VNN without the need to know the current active node. Since Virtual IP works different in Azure environment, you are required to configure an Azure Internal Load Balancer for automated failovers through VNN. Azure Load Balancer distributes inbound flows that arrive at the load balancer's front end to backend pool instances which should be configured as the Azure Virtual Machines running SQL FCI nodes.
The DNN resource in Windows Server Failover Cluster provides an alternative way for SQL client to connect to the SQL FCI without an Azure Load Balancer. When a DNN resource is created, WSFC binds the DNN DNS name with the IP addresses of all nodes in the cluster. SQL client will try to connect each IP address in this list to find the active node. This connection process can be further accelerated by connecting all IP addresses in parallel with the SQL connection property "MultiSubnetFailover" is set to true, enabling SQL client to connect to the current running FCI instantly. DNN would be helpful in any environment including on-premises where IP Addresses are scarce, and you do not need to connect directly to the cluster group to manage the cluster.
You can configure DNN for SQL FCI connectivity basically in 5 simple steps as shown in the example below. First, create the DNN resource in WSFC for the resource group hosting SQL FCI (for default SQL instance group name is “SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)”), then set the DNS Name of the DNN resource with “SQL FCI name”, and start the resource (verify owner node list for DNN resource only includes SQL FCI nodes ). At this point DNN resource will be ready to use, so restart SQL Server and update connection string to start using the DNN.
Add-ClusterResource -Name dnn-demo -ResourceType "Distributed Network Name" -Group "SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)"
2. Set DNS name of the DNN resource
Get-ClusterResource -Name dnn-demo | Set-ClusterParameter -Name DnsName -Value sqlfciname
Start-ClusterResource -Name dnn-demo
- Configure owners of DNN resource by selecting only the nodes part of SQL FCI.
4. Restart SQL Server
5. Update Connection String for parallel querying of FCI nodes with Multi Subnet Failover property
Add “MultiSubnetFailover=True” property to SQL connection string and set the Server Name as the DNS name of DNN property.
You can keep using the same name for an existing SQL FCI, to do that simply:
- Rename current SQL FCI VNN to a temporary name
- Set DNN DNS name as the current VNN name,
With .NET framework 4.6.1, MultisubnetFailover support is turned on by default; no client-side change is needed if you are using 4.6.1 and higher and same SQL FCI name is used.
Azure Shared Disks for SQL FCI
Second feature enabling lift and shift migrations of SQL FCI to Azure is Azure Shared Disks. Azure Shared disks can be attached to multiple VMs in the Windows Failover Cluster at the same time. The VM that can read or write to the disk is chosen by the Cluster service based on the SCSI Persistent Reservations (SCSI PR). SCSI PR is widely leveraged by SQL FCI running on Storage Area Network (SAN) on-premises, and Azure Shared disks enables migrating those to Azure VMs as is.
You should create the Azure Shared disks by setting “Max Shares = 2” for a 2 node SQL FCI, and then attach the disk to both SQL FCI nodes. You can use Failover Cluster Manager and present the shared disk to the cluster as Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) and then use it for SQL Server Data and Log files. Please follow this tutorial to deploy SQL FCI with Azure Shared Disks. You can use Premium SSD and Ultra Shared disks with all versions of SQL FCI as now it is generally available.
To access Azure Shared Disks, both FCI nodes should be placed on the same Availability Set and Proximity Placement Group. Using the same Availability Set guarantees 99.95% HA SLA at the VM level, when one VM is down for planned maintenance the other will be available. Proximity placement groups creates a logical grouping of Azure compute resources which assures that they are physically located close to each other to achieve the lowest network latency. SQL FCI configured with Azure Shared Disks on an availability sets and PPG offers a high-performance HA solution at the instance level for mission critical SQL Server workloads.
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