SQL Server AlwaysOn - Summary

AlwaysOn is a very large feature in SQL Server and we needed to talk about all of the parts so that you could understand how important different configuration steps are. But now we know you want to configure an AlwaysOn landscape and going back through all 12 blogs to make the list of the steps you need to do will take a lot of work.

So we've summarized here the main steps you need to decide/perform when configuring AlwaysOn and each step links to the blog entry which describes it in detail.

Preparation:

• SAP releases supporting AlwaysOn
• Preconditions for Windows
• Preparations on SQL Server side
• Initial synchronization of the database

Installation

• Creation of the first Availability Group
• Checks before going productive

Configuration

• Configure failover time
• Configure the session timeout
• Health Check timeout, Failure Conditions and other settings
• Switching scheduled tasks automatically
• SQL Agent Jobs in an AlwaysOn / Mirroring Environment

Production

• Failing over
• Using DMVs to monitor the AlwaysOn configuration
• Performance Aspects and Performance Monitoring

Additional readings

• Prerequisites, Restrictions, and Recommendations for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server)
• Understanding Cluster Shared Volumes in a Failover Cluster

You can book mark this page so that whenever you need to configure an AlwaysOn landscape, you have this list of configuration steps. If we add any updates to the steps needed for AlwaysOn, we'll update this list as well.

If you need more in-depth explanations and information about the functionality of an AlwaysOn System, you will find it in this complete list of the blog series:

• Part 1: What is AlwaysOn ?

• • What functionality got improved with AlwaysOn?
  • Terminology
  • Readable Secondaries
  • Backup from the Secondary
  • Impact of the new Log Cache
  • Some more Details on Data Replication

• Part 2: Quorum detection / How do we achive quorum ?

• Part 3: SAP Configuration with two replicas

• • Move from Database Mirroring and Log-Shipping to AlwaysOn
  • De-Assign quorum vote from WSFC node
  • Moving the cluster group

• Part 4: SAP Configuration in GEO-Cluster configuration

• • Considerations for using AlwaysOn in such a configuration
  • Creating an asymmetric storage cluster

• Part 5: Preparing to build an AlwaysOn Availability Group

• • Preconditions for Windows
  • Preparations on SQL Server side
  • Initial synchronization of the database
  • SAP releases supporting AlwaysOn

• Part 6: Building an AlwaysOn Availability Group

• • Creation of the first Availability Group
  • Checks before going productive

• Part 7: Details behind an AlwaysOn Availability Group

• • Step 1: Creation of the Communication Endpoints
  • Step 2: Creation of the Health Monitoring Session
  • Step 3: Creation of the Availability Group on the Primary
  • Step 4: Creation of the Availability Group Listener
  • Step 5: Did the secondaries join the group ?
  • Step 6: Configure failover time
  • Step 7: Configure the session timeout
  • Step 8: Health Check timeout, Failure Conditions and other settings

• Part 8: Failover Mechanism with SAP Netweaver

• • SAP reconnect Mechanism
  • Failing over
  • Information in the SQL Server Errorlog
  • Information in the SAP Developer Trace files

• Part 9: AlwaysOn and Log shipping

• • Considerations
  • SQL Agent Jobs

• Part 10: Switching scheduled tasks automatically

• Part 11+12: Performance Aspects and Performance Monitoring

• • What are the potential impacts of AlwaysOn ?
  • Things to think about in a non-shared disk configuration
  • Performance Counter for AlwaysOn
  • Analyze and monitor Data transfer and network volume between replicas
  • Moving to synchronous availability mode
  • What is the transaction delay we are expecting ?
  • How much data are we actually sending to the replicas ?
  • What comes back from the replicas ?
  • Something is wrong - We are persisting more data in the primary's transaction log than we are sending to the replicas
  • Using DMVs to monitor the AlwaysOn configuration
  • Are all systems in my AG onboard ?
  • How far is the secondary back?