Clustering

Training Week: Announcing Edwin’s New Class on Failover Clustered Instances

Last Updated April 11, 2018

This week, we’ve got a bunch of announcements about new training classes. Next up, Edwin Sarmiento: his 3-day Always On Availability Group class has been getting great reviews: “This class is fantastic. There is no filler, and no needless repetition, so be prepared to pay attention the entire duration. Edwin clearly is very passionate about…

New Windows Clustering Course for SQL Server DBAs by Edwin Sarmiento

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Clustering, SQL Server

The SQL Server community has been waiting a long time for an in-depth Windows clustering course on current versions of Windows. See, AlwaysOn Availability Groups as well as good ol’ Failover Clustered Instances both rely on Windows clustering in order to manage uptime. If you’re going to do an AG or an FCI, you gotta…

Updated High Availability and Disaster Recovery Planning Worksheet

Last Updated February 23, 2021

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Backup and Recovery, Clustering, SQL Server

One of the most popular things in our First Responder Kit is our HA/DR planning worksheet. Here’s page one: Page 1 – how our servers are doing now, versus what the business wants In the past, we had three columns on this worksheet – HA, DR, and Oops Deletes. In this new version, we changed “Oops”…

Common SQL Server Clustering, AlwaysOn, and High Availability Answers

Last Updated March 22, 2019

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Clustering, SQL Server

Our live webcast topic this week was Q&A – you could bring any HA/DR questions, and we could avoid your answers. Just kidding. Here’s the webcast – we apologize for the audio, WebEx is still getting their act together. It cleans up after the first couple of minutes. And here’s the questions we couldn’t get…

Introduction to SQL Server Failover Clusters (video)

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Kendra Little

Clustering, SQL Server

You’d love to know how to make your SQL Servers more highly available, but you’re just not sure what “clustering” is all about. We can help! In this 30 minute video Kendra Little shows you how failover clusters make your SQL Servers easier to manage. She uses diagrams and drawings to teach you the strengths…

Answers to Common High Availability and Disaster Recovery Questions

Last Updated December 5, 2017

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery, Clustering

In our recent webcast on HA & DR basics for DBAs, we got a bunch of questions that couldn’t be answered fast enough. Here you go: Q: Do any of these techniques work for companies with just 1-2 IT staff? To keep things simple, I’d check out virtualization replication like VMware SRM. SRM isn’t…

VMware HA is Not Database Server High Availability

Last Updated April 8, 2017

Brent Ozar

Clustering, SQL Server, Virtualization

I served with High Availability. I knew High Availability. High Availability was a friend of mine. VMware HA, you’re no High Availability. See, for us database administrators, high availability means protection when: The system drive fills up because some potato decided to download a bunch of files An operating system or database server update goes…

Why Your SQL Server Cluster Shouldn’t Be Virtualized

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Clustering, Virtualization

When people buy my virtualization training video, one of the followup questions I get most often via email is, “Can I build SQL Server clusters in VMware and Hyper-V?” In theory, yes. Microsoft’s knowledge base article on SQL Server virtualization support says they’ll support you as long as you’re using configurations listed in the Server…

Why Your SQL Server’s Network Connection Matters

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Clustering

If you’re using SQL Server 2012’s hot new AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature, your databases will go offline when your network connection does – even if you’re using asynchronous replication. This is not a bug. This is working as designed – and it’s important to understand the underlying concepts. Nothing to see here, I'm just going…

Everything You Know About Clustering is Wrong

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Brent Ozar

Clustering

Remember that weirdo in high school who had no social skills? Couldn’t get a date, worked at the fast food joint as a fry cook, face covered with zits – you know the one. Okay, actually, it was us. Anyway, the point is, we got our act together, didn’t we? So did Windows Failover Clustering. …

An Introduction to SQL Server Clusters

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Kendra Little

Clustering

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The options for high availability can get confusing. I was lucky enough to begin working with SQL Server clusters early in my career, but many people have a hard time finding simple information on what a cluster does and the most common gotchas when planning a cluster. Today, I’ll tell you what clusters are, what they’re…