HADR – MSSQLTREK

What are Read scale Availability Groups ? (Also referred as Cluster less availability groups many times)

In this blog post let’s see what read scale AGs are and few scenarios when they can be useful for us and how to actually create them. So what exactly is a read scale AG? Well, Microsoft introduced these AGs in SQL 2017 just to serve a single purpose which is to scale our read work loads. These AGs do not offer HA capabilities which we get with a typical AG deployment running on a failover cluster. Since there is no cluster behind the scenes, there is no concept of health checks and hence no automatic failovers. To keep it very simple, consider them as Not Always On AGs 🙂

Well, when can I use Read Scale AGs?

Think of a scenario where all you want is to just isolate your read workload for a given database(s) which doesn’t have any HA requirements and your users and applications are okay connecting directly to your secondary replica for read/reporting work loads, do you really need clustering here? If you are absolutely sure that your AG is not being used for making your database highly available, why to have a cluster and why deal with it?

Note: Read scale AGs do not offer high availability capabilities, This is not for your mission critical database(s) which require HA with automatic failover capabilities. If you have to throw HA in the mix, just stick to traditional AGs.

If not for HA, How about Disaster recovery?

we can certainly get the DR capabilities with Read scale AGs. The reason I say that is, we can have synchronous commit setup which pretty much guarantees the same RPO as a traditional AG would do. Even in a traditional setup when ever I think DR, it’s a manual failover for me….YMMV.

Aaaalright, let’s get into action. I have two standalone SQL Server 2019 Instances joined in the same domain which are not participating in any kind of clustering…you know, just two simple VMs joined to my domain running Windows/SQL, nothing fancy.

First thing first, I enabled AG feature by going to SQL config manager(I did this on both servers), you can see it says “This computer is not participating in a failover cluster”. Duuuh!

I have a database (Not_AO_DB) on which I want to scale my read/reporting work load. well, I went ahead and restored the database manually with norecovery on my second Instance as part of preparing the DB to join in my AG later on.

Nothing new so far right, Now….from SSMS, I choose to use AG creation wizard, gave my AG a name and notice the Cluster type selection in below screenshot, that should be NONE.

Proceed further and select the database(s) that you want to join in AG, I have “Not_AO_DB” database in my case.

Now notice the highlighted Failover mode, you can see there is only one option(Manual) which can’t be changed(Remember, no clustering means no built in Automatic failover). Set your desired Availability mode to either Synch or Asynch.

It is important to remember, All the good old rules for endpoints like TCP port communication and account permissions etc etc still needs to be in place. The actual SQL Server AG mechanics are same here with read scale AGs.

Time for rules check…Next…Next…Finish!

That’s it folks! That’s pretty much what it takes to create a read scale Availability group. Below is how my dashboard looked like after successful creation of my AG.

In the next post, let’s see how to failover a read scale availability group, Listener GOTCHAS and learn how it is different from a traditional AG.

Happy holidays!

Microsoft SQL Server provides us with a wide variety of solutions to architect High availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions for mission-critical workloads. In this article, let’s just focus on HA, specifically Failover Clustering. Failover clustering is probably the most mature, robust and stable high availability solution which Windows Server Operating system offers. It’s been there around for few decades now and did evolve over time along with SQL Server. In this article Let’s see a hidden feature of windows server failover cluster which helps in making our already highly available SQL Server Failover clustered instances even more highly available. The new feature which we are going to talk about is Cluster Shared Volumes, AKA CSVs. Considering windows server 2019 is around the corner, I say CSVs are not a new concept in clustering, it’s been there for almost a decade now. Microsoft introduced CSVs in windows server 2008R2, but at that time SQL Server was not supported on CSVs. Well, CSVs were originally designed for Hyper-V workloads and later on enhanced for File servers and eventually landed into SQL Server beginning version 2014.

Fair enough, but why should we care about Cluster shared volumes?

Well, the idea behind introducing CSVs is to provide truly shared disks to a failover cluster which are available to all the nodes for reading and write operations. Let’s talk about a traditional Failover clustered Instance setup for a moment. During Failover, to bring SQL Server resource online, the drives should be unmounted on the previous owner and remounted on the node which will act as the primary after failover. Should your IO subsystem become bottleneck for whatever reason, Unmounting and mounting process takes longer time thus impacting the availability of the system. Whereas with CSVs, there is no unmounting and mounting of disks since they are already made available for reading and write operations across all the nodes. In other words, it reduces downtime since SQL Server resource is no longer dependent on disks to come online. Let’s talk about one more scenario where CSVs outperform traditional shared storage. Let’s assume disk(s) loses connectivity from the node which is currently running SQL Server in middle of the day, under these circumstances the cluster can leverage another path (s) available to the shared disk without having to failover the resource group to another node. This will save us from potential unplanned downtime during business hours.