up vote 3 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

We are currently hosting a SaaS website on two Windows 2008 R2 / SQL Server 2008 R2 Servers. Would upgrading to SQL Server 2012 / Always On give us any advantages with respects to high availability?

Note that while we are looking for high availability, high performance is not really an issue for us at the moment, so being able to run read-only queries on backup database servers is not really important.

link|improve this question
It looks as though as far as high availability goes, it's no better than a fully redundant clustered system. So if you have a good clustered system, then stick with it. However, I'm not really 100% sure about that, as my research is a bit thin (we won't be upgrading because the new licensing, combined with vmware's licensing change last year, left us with little budget for software upgrades) – Mark Henderson Feb 1 at 19:31
feedback

migrated from serverfault.com Feb 1 at 19:38

This question came from our site for system administrators and desktop support professionals.

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Readable Secondaries: you can query the 'mirror'. See AlwaysOn: High-Availability and reads Scale-Out.

link|improve this answer
This might be an advantage for those who need high performance but, as already noted, this is relevant for us since our database server is idling anyway. – Adrian Grigore Feb 2 at 12:34
Secondary Backups then perhaps – Remus Rusanu Feb 3 at 4:24
it is an advantage, but only if you have more than two nodes, which would not be the case for us. – Adrian Grigore Feb 4 at 7:59
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

My understanding is that AlwaysOn is a shared nothing configuration. Brent Ozar kinds confirms this and extends it by saying that it doesn't require the same hardware.

Here's his writeup (from a few years ago, actually).

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/11/sql-server-denali-database-mirroring-rocks/

Here's the BOL for AlwaysOn

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff877884%28v=SQL.110%29.aspx

link|improve this answer
1  
But Mirroring with SQL Server 2008 R2 works just as well on different hardware. One of our servers runs on an Intel CPU, whereas the backup is using an AMD CPU. – Adrian Grigore Feb 2 at 12:36
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.