Availability Groups
Availability groups are set of failover partners (a.k.a. availability replicas) that provide high availability to user databases in Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Setting up an Availability Group
Step 1 : Install Windows Cluster; create a Windows Server 2008 R2 two-node cluster using Windows Hyper-V and a Domain Controller.
Step 2 : Install a Standalone SQL Server 2012 instance on both nodes.
· Use the domain account for the SQL service account.
· Open Port 1433 and 5022 or disable the Windows Firewall.
Step 3: Create a sample database on both SQL Server Instances, making sure the Recovery model is set to Full – See below:
Step 4: Back up this test database to a shared folder.
Step 5 : Enable the AlwaysOn feature on both instances.
· Open SQL Server Configuration Manager
· Select SQL Server Services
· Right-click on your SQL Server (in our example it is named MSSQLSERVER) and select Properties
· Select the “AlwaysOn High Availability” tab and check "Enable AlwaysOn Availability Groups"
Step 6: Create an Availability Group
· Choose any one instance to become the PRIMARY (say Node1\MSSQLSERVER)
· Open SQL Server Management Studio on Node2\MSSQLSERVER
· Expand the Management folder
· Right-click “Availability Groups” and select “New Availability Group Wizard…”
· Click Next on the Introduction Screen
· Provide a name to the Availability Group
· Select the test database to be added into the Availability Group.
· Specify Replicas – Add the other instances (Node2\MSSQLSERVER) to assume the role of secondary for this user database
· Create an availability group listener.
· Specify the shared folder as location store the data.
· Assuming validation all passes, click Next and then Finish.
Step 7: Install VMM 2012 on the created Availability Group Listeners.
After installing the Availability Group (AG) successfully, you will see a resource that has the same name as the AG in the Failover Cluster Manager Panel. We can install VMM 2012 using the Listeners DNS name as database server.
After the VMM 2012 installation, go to SQL Server Management studio and change your VMM 2012 database’s recovery mode to full and do a backup . Then, go to Availability Databases and go through the Add Database wizard to add your VMM database to the Availability Databases.
Step 8: To test, failover from Node 1 to Node 2.
· Open Failover Cluster Manager, navigate to Services and applications ->’AG’.
· Right-click ‘Move this service or application to another node’ –> ’Move to Node 2’ (or whatever the name of your other node is)
If everything is configured properly then VMM 2012 should not have any issues with this action.
Dipti Goyal | SDET | Fabric Management
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