Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Solutions Guide for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Writer: LeRoy Tuttle, Jr. (Microsoft).

Contributors: Cephas Lin (Microsoft), Justin Erickson (Microsoft), Lindsey Allen (Microsoft), Min He (Microsoft), Sanjay Mishra (Microsoft).

Reviewers: Alexei Khalyako (Microsoft), Allan Hirt (SQLHA), Ayad Shammout (Caregroup), Benjamin Wright-Jones (Microsoft), Charles Matthews (Microsoft), David P. Smith (ServiceU), Juergen Thomas (Microsoft), Kevin Farlee (Microsoft), Shahryar G. Hashemi (Motricity), Wolfgang Kutschera (Bwin Party).

 

Summary: This white paper discusses how to reduce planned and unplanned downtime, maximize application availability, and provide data protection using SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn high availability and disaster recovery solutions.

A key goal of this paper is to establish a common context for related discussions between business stakeholders, technical decision makers, system architects, infrastructure engineers, and database administrators.

The content is presented in two major parts:

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Concepts. Provide a brief discussion of the drivers and challenges of planning, managing, and measuring the business objectives of a highly available database environment. This discussion is followed by a brief overview of the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn and Windows Server solutions.

SQL Server AlwaysOn Layers of Protection. Provide a deeper discussion of the feature capabilities, rationale, and dependencies of the layers of protection offered by a SQL Server AlwaysOn solution. It will cover infrastructure availability, SQL Server instance-level protection, database-level protection, and data tier application capabilities.

Read on: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh781257.aspx