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2012 AlwaysOn groups and EV 10

Matthew_J
Level 4

I'm pushing to get our EV 10 databases off of our ancient SQL 2005 servers, and am trying to determine how best to implement HA.  Our SQL 2012 HA is configured with two physical servers, each with their own disk on separate SANs, and we utilize AlwaysOn availability groups to provide HA functionality, whereas our 2005 SQL servers were clustered with shared disk storage.  We have a separate instance configured on both SQL 2012 servers for vault.  For the sake of example, let's say our SQL servers are called "SQL1" and "SQL2", so the vault instance on each is SQL1\Vault and SQL2\Vault.

I know the official line is that AlwaysOn AG's are not supported until version 12, but is it safe to put the DB's into an AO group anyway, but configure EV to use only the current primary node's listener (IE, not something like "SQL-Vault,portnumber" but simply "SQL1\Vault"?  This would provide a measure of HA for vault, in that the database would be replicated in two places, but would still involve a (well-documented) manual failover procedure

In this scenario, our HA would be manual (meaning if the primary goes down or needs maintenance, we would need to take the vault services down, run through the procedure to repoint the DB's at SQL2\Vault instance, and restart services).

We use Netbackup 7.5 to protect our Vault DB's, so maybe this isn't so cut and dried, since I understand Netbackup may have trouble backing up DB's that are in AO groups also.  

Is this a ridiculous idea that is going to wind up in db corruption and many tears and heartaches.... or is this an acceptable stop-gap until we can, later this spring, upgrade to Vault 12.  Should I scrap this idea and look at Database mirroring for the vault DB's instead?  I'm not a SQL guy per say, I know about enough to be dangerous and I'm trying to get a sanity check on whether this is a dangerous idea or an ok one.  

1 REPLY 1

GertjanA
Moderator
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Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hello Matthew,

I am no SQL expert in anyway, so really dangerous :)

I strongly advise to NOT put the databases in an AO group, and somehow trick EV to think it is not. If you run into issues you will NOT get support, as you are running an unsupported configuration.

I therefor also strongly advise to call support, explain your scenario, and see what they say. If they can provide a way of working(or a KB article or something), and confirm that that will be supported, go for it. If not, you're only option would be to upgrade EV first, then use AO groups.

Regards. Gertjan