Is it possible to move to Alwayson Availability groups from existing sql server FCI ?

Is it possible to move to Alwayson Availability groups from? existing sql server FCI ?
If yes, how to move and what are the pre-requisites?

Hi Rahul,
Based on your description, we need to verify if you want to move from Failover Cluster Instances(FCI) and database mirroring to SQL Server Alwayson Availability groups. If so, it is possible.
You can review the following articles to get more detailed information about this kind of migration.
How To: Migrate from Failover Cluster Instances and Database Mirroring to SQL Server AlwaysOn
– Part 1
How To: Migrate from Failover Cluster Instances and Database Mirroring to SQL Server AlwaysOn
– Part 2
Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

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the two nodes. From there we should be able to configure avaialbility groups.
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thanks
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Hello,
What you have is pretty much it. Since AGs require clustering but do not require a clustered install (stand alone install is used) there shouldn't be any changes with the actual install. You will have to enable the HADR option in the configuration manager
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Alwayson Availability groups for a WSFC hosting mutliple SQL FCI's

Hello,
I have a question regarding SQL server FCI's and alwayson availability groups.
Today I have a customer running a 2 node WSFC hosting 9 different SQL FCI's.
Plan is to introduce on this setup SQL alwayson availability groups one per SQL FCI.
Per SQL FCI, running on the 2 node WSFC, we are planning to introduce a dedicated
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FCI and one replica as secondary on 1 extra node added to the WSFC.
Question i have is, is this a supported configuration?
Thanks in advance
Regards
Raf

This is a supported scenario. However, make sure that no FCI node will run a SQL Server instance acting as a replica. This means you cannot install a standalone instance on one of the FCI nodes and make it an AG replica. You also cannot configure another
FCI in the same WSFC to be a secondary replica in an AG. If you intend to configure AG per SQL Server FCI, you need to add another node in the WSFC and install a SQL Server instance on that node. This can be a SQL Server FCI (which means you need to add two
more nodes instead of just one) or a standalone instance. Also, having an FCI in an AG configuration means that you lose the ability to do automatic failover on the AG-level. This is because the FCI takes care of automatic failover on the instance-level.
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Always on Availability on 2 different SQL Server clusters

SQL Server 2012 EE on WIndows 2008 R2.
Is it possible to have Always on Availability on 2 different SQL Server clusters ?. Could 2 SQL Server clusters be on 1 Windows server failover cluster (WSFC) ?. We have a Prod domain and DR01 domain with 3 nodes SQL Server clusters each. How can we setup
Always On Availability groups on these clusters to make replica of Production databases on the Prod to DR01 domain cluster ?. What do we need to do to get this working ?...................Thanks.

DCarlos unfortunately the requirement for AlwaysOn Availability Groups are a Single Domain, A single WSFC. The WSFC in multiple sites is supported with either a stretched VLan or multiple Subnets.
If your environment does require you to have different Domains for Prod and DR then you would have to look at potentially other ways of achieving your data replicated across from prod to DR.
You could look at using Database Mirroring (Yes I know this has been marked for deprecation) to achieve your data transfer. Or depending on your RPO and RTO requirements Logshipping may be an option.
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SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group modifies preferred owner node on move/failover

I have a two node Windows Server 2012 R2 failover cluster with two SQL Server 2012 Enterprise AlwaysOn Availability groups configured. Within the cluster I have configured a preference order on which node a AlwaysOn Availability Group should run.
Get-ClusterGroup -Name "AlwaysOn1" | Set-ClusterOwnerNode -Owners "node1","node2";
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After configuring the preference and retrieving the preference order it is configured as it should be. When I do a failover the preference order is adjusted to first the node it currently runs on and second the other node instead of leaving the preference
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has been moved.
INFO [GUM] Node 2: executing request locally, gumId:15859, my action: /rcm/gum/SetGroupPreferredOwners, # of updates: 1
INFO [RCM] rcm::RcmGum::SetGroupPreferredOwners(AlwaysOn1,<vector len='2'>
The default groups within the cluster "Available Storage" and "Cluster Group" keep their preference setting when configured (only configured for testing to verify it has to do with the SQL Server Availability Group resource type).
The Windows Server 2012 R2 servers are updated using the latest Windows Updates and SQL 2012 has build number 11.0.5556.
For other cluster groups which I have configured in the past like file, Hyper-V (used for affinity to get VM's which have a lot of traffic between them within the same virtual switch to reduce latency and additional hops. it would be nice if vNext will have
a affinity option for cluster groups besides the anti-affinity within the current version)
I would like to know if someone could explain why the SQL Server Availability Group resource always modifies the group preference. I might understand this with a three node cluster where the first two are running in Synchronous commit mode and the third
one in Asynchronous commit mode.
Thanks in advance,
Dennis van den Akker

Hi Dennis van den Akker,
Do not use the Failover Cluster Manager to manipulate availability groups, for example:
Do not add or remove resources in the clustered service (resource group) for the availability group.
Do not change any availability group properties, such as the possible owners and preferred owners. These properties are set automatically by the availability group.
Do not use the Failover Cluster Manager to move availability groups to different nodes or to fail over availability groups. The Failover Cluster Manager is not aware of the synchronization status of the availability replicas, and doing so can lead to extended
downtime. You must use Transact-SQL or SQL Server Management Studio.
The related KB:
Failover Clustering and AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929171.aspx
The similar thread:
SQL Server Clustering 2008 (Multi Node)
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/zh-CN/c35fe863-3fed-4a6e-830b-b79aa032c198/sql-server-clustering-2008-multi-node?forum=sqldisasterrecovery
Best Regards,
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected]

Moving the Reporting Services and Report Server DB into AlwaysON Availability Group

I have configured the new set of SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group and need to move the SSRS and it's Report Server DB into that Availability Group.
Can anyone give tell me the steps to do this move?
Can I just backup the ReportServer DB into the AG server then import that DB into the SSRS running on the new AlwasyOn AG SQL?

Hello,
Based on your description, it seems that you want to move the Report Server database to a different server. If so, both the reportserver and reportservertempdb databases must be moved or copied together. You can move the databases by using Detaching
and Attaching or Backup and Restore.
What's more, you should also backup the encryption keys for the report server database you want to move and then restore to the new server.
You can configure report server databases in Always On Availability Group to be part of a replica; however Reporting Services will not automatically use a different replica for the report server databases when a failover occurs
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Moving the Report Server Databases to Another Computer
Reporting Services with AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server)
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Maintenance plan for SQL Server 2012 Database in AlwaysOn Availability Group

Hi all,
I need assistance creating a maintenance plan that will backup a databases logs in order to prevent them from filling up the drive they are located on. I have looked at some blogs but they do not specifically show how this is done.
My database is in an AlwaysOn Availability Group.
Thank you very much for your help!
Jake

Hi all,
I need assistance creating a maintenance plan that will backup a databases logs in order to prevent them from filling up the drive they are located on. I have looked at some blogs but they do not specifically show how this is done.
My database is in an AlwaysOn Availability Group.
Regular maintenance plan would work. Only thing to remember is that when you create log backup plan, there is a checkbox which says whether it should honor backup preference or not.
Balmukund Lakhani
Please mark solved if I've answered your question, vote for it as helpful to help other users find a solution quicker
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Author: SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn -
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Cross-domain AlwaysOn Availability Groups

I had a colleague of mine comment in a meeting that SQL Server 2014 supports cross-domain data synchronisation using AlwaysOn Availability Groups. I didn't contradict that immediately because, even though I thought it wasn't the case, I couldn't find
any documentation either confirming or denying it.
Looking at the Network Access section for troubleshooting AlwaysOn AG (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff878308.aspx#NetworkAccess), the inference is that you
can have AlwaysOn AG spanning different domains. However, one of the pre-requisities for creating a WSFC is that all servers that are to be added as cluster nodes are joined to the same Active Directory domain (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn505754.aspx).
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Check this blog -
http://sqlha.com/2012/04/13/allans-alwayson-availability-groups-faq/
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The fact that all the participating nodes in an Always ON availability group has to be members of the same WSFC makes it clear that we cannot have cross domain Always ON.
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Will SCCM 2012 R2 , SCOM 2012 R2 and SCDPM R2 2012 support SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group ?

Will SCCM 2012 R2 , SCOM 2012 R2 and SCDPM R2 2012 support SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group ?

Hi,
It is listed here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn281933.aspx
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regards,
Jörgen
-- My System Center blog ccmexec.com -- Twitter
@ccmexec

2012 SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group - JDBC re-connection not happening in case of Multisubnet failover

Hi There,
Having some problem with MultiSubNet AG failover re-connection using SQL JDBC driver 4. Details given below.
SETUP:
We have a three node 2012 Windows Server Cluster, on top it we have 2012 SQL Sever AlwaysOn Availability Group.
Two nodes are in one subnet and other in a different subnet to make this as a multisubnet AlwaysOn AG.
An AG Listener is configured with a DNS name and two VIP assigned (For two subnet) to it. We were able to failover from one subnet to other using the SQL Studio successfully.
NEED:
We have a java application which will be connected to AG Listener name. In case of failover, automatic re-connection to DB/AG Listener name should happen.
For this we use "sqljdbc4.jar" and added
'multiSubnetFailover=true' in our connection string. The connection String is given below.
cURL="jdbc:sqlserver://testsqlag:1433;databaseName=SalesDB;multiSubnetFailover=true;loginTimeout=200;applicationName=MyApp";
THE PROBLEM:
In case of AG failover, driver is not trying to re-connect to the AG Listener name. Not sure how to make it work.
Is this supported in SQL Server 2012 ?
Thanks,
Krishna.

Hi Sean,
Thanks for your answer.
I looked at the link earlier, but it was not very clear that, whether the mssql jdbc driver will automatically re-connect to AG Listener name in case of failure of Primary replica which will result in Multisubnet failover. Pasted the confusing statements
from the link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg558121(v=sql.110).aspx.
Also, because a connection can fail because of an availability group failover, you should implement connection retry logic, retrying a failed connection until it reconnects.
Connecting With MultiSubnetFailover :
During a multi-subnet failover, the client will attempt connections in parallel. During a subnet failover, the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server will aggressively retry the TCP connection.
Thanks,
Krishna.

Use service accounts at AlwaysOn Availability Groups

Valued readers,
We have a AlwaysOn Availability Group consisting of 2 SQL servers. Both servers have their own service account for the sql services. I read in all sorts of documents on the internet that it is recommended that the sql service account on all servers within
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Hello Sean,
No I do not think so. Do you mean this :
“Find your service account and hit the Security tab
Select “SELF” in the “Groups or user names” listbox
Find “Write public information” in the “Permissions for SELF” listbox
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AlwaysOn Availability groups and unable to backup LOG files

Hi,
I have an issue where we are using AlwaysOn availability groups, however my transaction log backup jobs are not working for any databases that are part of the groups. Databases which are standalone backup fine. I've tried using the builtin maintenance
plans as well as the 'maintenance script' from Ola Hallengren which is my preference.
All the jobs are reporting success even though nothing is bring written to disk, the jobs complete within a few seconds.
If I backup the log files individually myself they work fine. After
going a bit of Googling this appears to have been a known issue that was fixed in CU7, unfortunately I'm running CU9 and still have the issue.
I've tried changing the backup preference to any, as well as primary or secondary only to no avail.
I'm using SQL Server SP1 CU9, 2 nodes in the group. Anyone have any suggestions?
Marcus

Hi,
I understand that you have tried every options in Backup Preferences. I still suggest you enable the “For availability database. Ignore Replica Priority for Backup and Backup on Primary Settings” when you define the maintenance plan and check how it works.
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Reference:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alwaysonpro/archive/2014/01/02/maintenance-plan-does-not-backup-database-or-log-of-database-that-belongs-to-availability-group.aspx
Hope it helps.
Tracy Cai
TechNet Community Support

Initermittent Connection Timeout at Post-Login when connect to AlwaysOn Availability Group listener

Hi,
I'm using SQL 2014 AlwaysOn Availability Group and my ASP .Net application is connected to the database thru the availability group listener (tcp:[myHAGroup],14330).
Things work most of the time, but recently I started to see the following Connection Timeout exception in Event Log. It looks like under heavy traffic the application can't connect to the availability group listener.
Timestamp: 8/17/2014 10:07:28 AM
Message: System.Data.EntityException: The underlying provider failed on Open. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Connection Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed during the post-login phase. The connection could have timed out while waiting for server to complete the login process and respond; Or it could have timed out while attempting to create multiple active connections. The duration spent while attempting to connect to this server was - [Pre-Login] initialization=2; handshake=0; [Login] initialization=0; authentication=0; [Post-Login] complete=15008; ---> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The wait operation timed out
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
I've checked SQL Profiler and don't see any memory or CPU peak at that time. Looks like somethings happened during the Post-Login stage, but I couldn't figure out what or why....
I'm using 2 SQL servers (1 primary, 1 secondary): SQL 2014 ENT, 8GB RAM, 8 core 2.67 Xeon X5650.
Application: ASP .Net, framework 4.0.
All servers are VMWare virtualization servers, running on 1 virtual switch, so internal traffic should not be a problem.
Comments/ideas are appreciated.
Eric.

Hi Eric Nguyen,
According to your description and error message, we need to verify if there are some queries/transaction lock your database via SQL trace. If yes,
you have to find out which queries are blocking and rewrite them/run them at other time to avoid blocking other processes.
In addition, you can use performance monitor to track connection pool connections. If you set default connection limit and timeout limit with a small number, the error of “wait operation timed out” will occur. Meanwhile, you also need to monitor disk usage
on SQL Server , and set the auto increment size of your transaction log and database with a fixed size instead of a percentage of the current files due to avoid transaction timeout. For more information, see:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7743725/how-to-troubleshoot-intermittent-sql-timeout-errors
There is an similar issue about connection failed from webservers to SQL Server AlwaysOn Listener, you can review it.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23416492/connection-timeouts-when-using-multisubnetfailover-true
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Sofiya Li
TechNet Community Support

Uninterrupted availability of data in SQL Server

I'm trying to solve a problem my company has in its data warehouse of data availability. We have dozens of transactional databases in production from which we pull data to create a cache of data that we make available to reports for both internal and external
customers.
The problem I'm trying to solve is I want all of the people using the data to still be able to access the previous version of the data (maybe data from an hour ago) while the new data is being refreshed. I have looked at a lot of ways this is possible. From
the very manual, the built in solutions, or a custom drive cloning solution but I'd like to hear from the community what people think is the best way to go about this. The server version is SQL Server 2008, but we could install 2012 in time for this need.
Right now I'm leaning towards AlwaysOn Availability Groups but if there's something better I'd love to know about it.

Thank you for your response. It took a few days but I finally had time to look at the article you linked. Database snapshots look like they are exactly what I need at first, but I read two lines in the article that make me think they may not be.
Under "Limitations of Database Snapshots"
When a page getting updated on the source database is pushed to a snapshot, if the snapshot runs out of disk space or encounters some other error, the snapshot becomes suspect and must be deleted.
And under the section titled "Disk Space Requirements"
Database snapshots consume disk space. [...] Compared to a full copy of a database, however, snapshots are highly space efficient.
A snapshot requires only enough storage for the pages that change during its lifetime. Generally, snapshots are kept for a limited time, so their size is not a major concern.
These two statements seem to say that the snapshot changes as the underlying database changes. I would like a snapshot that remains unchanged while I refresh the underlying database. After which I can refresh the snapshot so that people querying against
the snapshot get data from a version of the database in a state where the refresh is complete. I don't want people to query against incomplete, partially refreshed data.
Is there a way to tell the snapshot to not respect any updates that occur in the source database? Or maybe at least ignore updates for a period of time?
Snapshot does not get updated.. As you update the data,, the snapshot will store the old data in its file and new data will go the actual database.
so, when you create the database snapshot, the snapshot database FILE does not contain any data. as changes happen - the old data is moved to snapshot file and the new data goes to actual database file. it ineeds to keep the old data, so when you query
your database snapshot, it can give your prior data back.
if you want update lot of datas, i do not think snapshot will br good solution. it is good to test something quick and\or where there are less data changes. if you update all the data, your snapshot would end to similar size as the original database.
if this works, you can quickly generate another snapshot and drop the old one. every new snapshot as said, will start from 0 and grows in size as changes happen.
Also you database snapshots are like new databases, you should change your connection strings to point to the right snapshot.
Hope it Helps!!

How can you change data on a SQL 2012 application database that uses availability groups from BizTalk server?

If you use the WCF-SQL adapter it is recommend that you set UseAmbientTransaction to true if you are changing data. I think this requires MSDTC to be enabled on the SQL server that you are changing the data on. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd787981.aspx)
I think that Availability groups does not support MSDTC. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms366279.aspx).
How can you change data on a SQL 2012 application database that uses availability groups from BizTalk server?

Hi,
Yes, Availability groups doesn't support MSDTC. Please refer to the similar discusison which maybe helpfull:
http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/47108/alwayson-ag-dtc-with-failover
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17179221/msdtc-in-always-on-availability-groups

Is it possible to move to Alwayson Availability groups from existing sql server FCI ?

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