AlwaysOn Availability Groups Troubleshooting and Monitoring Guide provides information on troubleshooting the common AlwaysOn Availability Groups issues and monitoring the availability group health. We will try to keep updating this guide as new troubleshooting...

The upgrade/update guide for availability group servers is now live on MSDN. Upgrade and Update of Availability Group Servers with Minimal Downtime and Data Loss It shows how to upgrade/update to any major, minor, service pack, or update release...

In this blog, I'd like to explore client connectivity strategy when you have an availability group that spans both your on-premise servers and Windows Azure VMs. From the outset, I should clarify that the availability group listener is not supported in...

In this blog, you will learn how to configure AlwaysOn Availability Groups end-to-end using Windows Azure VMs. The steps here are the GUI near-equivalent of the script-based tutorial, which has been published at Tutorial: AlwaysOn Availability Groups...

Hi Folks, For those interested in how to do SQL Server HADR in Windows Azure VMs, we have published a set of tutorials on Azure Documentation. A conceptual article gives you the overview for the subject and the tutorials show you how to set up specific...

Windows Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are currently in preview at www.windowsazure.com . SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery solutions are supported on Windows Azure VMs. For AlwaysOn Availability Groups, there is currently no support...

SQLPASS is next week at the Washington State Convention Center (Seattle). AlwaysOn will again be a significant aspect. There’ll be many sessions discussing AlwaysOn from Microsoft and MVPs, a mission-critical booth where we’ll give guidance...

Writer: Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors: Oleg Bulanyy (Microsoft), Jimmy May (Microsoft) This blog is the continuation of a blog series that shows you how to perform the following end-to-end HADR migration scenario of SQL Server inside a test...

Writer: Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors: Oleg Bulanyy (Microsoft), Jimmy May (Microsoft) This blog series is a follow-up to my whitepaper Migration Guide: Migrating to AlwaysOn Availability Groups from Prior Deployments Combining Database Mirroring...

Writer: Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors: Oleg Bulanyy (Microsoft), Jimmy May (Microsoft) NOTE: SQL Server Failover Clustering has been renamed AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) in SQL Server 2012. For simplicity, the term FCI in this...

Writer: Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors: Oleg Bulanyy (Microsoft), Jimmy May (Microsoft) NOTE: SQL Server Failover Clustering has been renamed AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) in SQL Server 2012. For simplicity, the term FCI in this...

Writer: Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors: Oleg Bulanyy (Microsoft), Jimmy May (Microsoft) NOTE: SQL Server Failover Clustering has been renamed AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) in SQL Server 2012. For simplicity, the term FCI in this...

Writer: Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors: Sanjay Mishra (Microsoft) Technical Reviewers: Aditya Samant (Microsoft), Juergen Thomas (Microsoft), Prem Mehra (Microsoft), Charles Mathews (Microsoft), Jimmy May (Microsoft), David P. Smith (ServiceU...

Newly published: two new architecture guides: AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups: http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/whitepapers/archive/2012/06/22/alwayson-architecture...

In this blog, I will show you how to quickly setup a two-server FCI in a single Hyper-V server with no extra hardware. The steps shown here are for TESTING purposes only. You can use the steps both to get started on the FCI solution as well as investigate how it works in a virtualized environment.

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Before you configure SQL Server Failover Clustering, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, or AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances, you must first create a WSFC cluster that encompasses all the servers. However, when you try to create a WSFC cluster in your domain, you might encounter the following error: You do not have permissions to create a computer object in Active Directory. Learn why this happens and how to avoid the error.

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Writer : Cephas Lin (Microsoft) Contributors : Sanjay Mishra (Microsoft), David Smith (ServiceU Corporation), LeRoy Tuttle Jr. (Microsoft) Technical Reviewers : Prem Mehra (Microsoft), Mike Weiner (Microsoft), Steve Howard (Microsoft), Kun Cheng...

Please read: http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/msdnmirror/archive/2012/03/30/concurrent-add-node-operation-yields-unexpected-results-in-a-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance.aspx

Please read: http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/msdnmirror/archive/2012/03/30/do-not-use-windows-failover-cluster-manager-to-perform-availability-group-failover.aspx

Quorum vote configuration check in AlwaysOn Availability Group Wizards By Andy Jing In this blog, I try to delve deeper into the guidelines of adjusting the quorum voting in the Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) for the availability groups...

Matt Neerincx from the SQL Server Data Programmability team discusses installing the latest AlwaysOn features for ADO.NET. Demonstrates how to install the ADO.NET updates and use the features with SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio.

Suppose you force your availability group to failover to a secondary replica, and when you open Object Explorer on the new primary you see the following: Why does this database have a “Warning” icon? This icon specifies that the database...

One of the most common questions I get from customers is which version of .NET supports SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn® connectivity. For those who are not familiar with SQL Server 2012, this is its new and exciting high availability feature. In a nutshell...

Part 4 – Scheduling and Notification with SQL Agent In Part 3 , we introduced the problem of automatically monitoring our availability group. We made some progress, developing a simple script that evaluates the health of an AG on a given server...

Part 3 – A Simple Monitoring Application for AlwaysOn In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we learned quite a bit about how the AlwaysOn health cmdlets operate. But why use these cmdlets when you can just use the dashboard? The answer is automation...