availability groups Archives - Page 5 of 8

August 19, 2015

SQL Server Availability Group Configurations With NO Domain Requirement

You may have noticed that Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 was released today. For the full announcement from Microsoft on the Server & Cloud blog, click here. There is one important line that all SQL Server folks should pay attention to:

Increase flexibility by removing domain-specific constraints for SQL Server clusters

Yes, kids. That means you can create a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) with NO – I repeat NO – domain required. This will not work for clustered instances (FCIs) since they still require domain-based service accounts, but it will work and be supported with SQL Server 2016 for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AGs). I would not expect Microsoft to go back and certify this configuration with SQL Server 2014 (or 2012 for that matter), but you never know. If you try and want to use 2012 or 2014 in this configuration, as of the posting of this blog post, it would be considered unsupported – don’t do that as it is the antithesis of mission critical.

This is huge and for many, will simplify AG configurations. No more CNOs and VCOs (although this was possible in Windows Server 2012 R2, you still needed the nodes to be domain joined). I have been testing this configuration with SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.2 and the builds of Windows Server 2016, but due to NDA, have not been able to talk about it until today because it had not been publicly announced. For everyone who has been complaining how DBM was better, you got your wish – this allows you to have an AG configuration which is the same as the one that you had using database mirroring (DBM) with certificates.

The demo configuration I will show below is multi-subnet to simulate two different data centers. Node One (SYLVESTER) is in subnet one and Node Two (TWEETY) is in subnet two. These are not joined to any domain as shown in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1. Sylvester not joined to a domain

Figure 2. Tweety is also not domain joined

So far, so good. My WSFC’s name is PUDDYTAT. The entire configuration can be seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3. WSFC info

I have an AG named AG1 with a Listener named GRANNY. Its info is in Figure 4.

Figure 4. AG info in the WSFC

While you can see that the AG is up and running in Figure 4, Figure 5 shows it working in SSMS. Viola!

Figure 5. AG working with no domain

If you don’t believe me yet, to further drive the point home, I left the accounts running the SQL Server instances as local accounts (NT Service\MSSQLSERVER and NT Service\SQLSERVERAGENT). This can be seen in Figure 6. Figure 6 also shows the properties of SQL Server where the ability to use AGs is enabled. This is very real and works as advertised. I’m excited about this.

Figure 6. Local service accounts but still joined to a WSFC

As always, there are some caveats to this configuration that you should be aware of:

At least in TP3, you cannot create or administer the WSFC via Failover Cluster Manager. Everything must be done in PowerShell. This may not change between now and RTM of Windows Server 2016, so if you are uncomfortable administering clusters via PowerShell, this is not a configuration you should be using. If you try to use Failover Cluster Manager, you will see the message in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Cannot use FCM in a non-domain scenario

This will make using the AG Wizard to do your backups a bit trickier since shared directories usually use domain-based accounts. You may have to manually deal with them if you are not using domains or do not have trusted domains.
There are some flags that get tripped during Cluster Validation (namely, no domain) that should be fixed by RTM. This is a known issue in TP3.
With no domain requirement, this also means no Kerberos however, if each node is in a different domain (i.e. one in Site, another domain in Site B) but crosses boundaries, you should be able to have Kerberos. I have not tested this configuration yet (it is on my list). This should even enable cross-domain migrations – again a scenario I have yet to test. There are more, but hey, first blog post and all of that.
You will need to add the DNS suffix manually otherwise the WSFC will not come online
Networking is clearly crucial here, and things like DNS replication will be important.
File Share Witness is not supported, so you will need to use asymmetric disk (which defeats the purpose of AGs with no shared storage) or Cloud Witness.

The good news is now that this is public, this bit will most likely make it into the book. I wanted to do a quick blog on it, and if I get time, I will show how I created this in a blog post soon. Also, with this now public, I may make this one of the labs for my PASS Summit 2015 preconference session Advanced SQL Server Availability Architectures and Deployments. Sign up now!

UPDATE: I just saw that Subhasish of the Cluster team on Windows just blogged a bit more about the Windows side of this.

Also, due to the fact that the AG configuration is standalone with no storage and there was an error during validation (TP3 known issue I mention above) due to the fact these are not domain joined, I used the -Force and -NoStorage options of New-Cluster.

July 23, 2015

Lots Of Upcoming Training and Speaking – Come See Me!

Happy Thursday, everyone! If you haven’t noticed, I have been pretty silent on the blog front. I am heads down writing the book (which is coming along nicely) as well as doing customer work. Fingers crossed, the book will be done before Summit. I will get back to a more normal blogging schedule when the book is done. Also, be sure to check out Max’s blog posts as he is now also regularly blogging here on the site.

It hasn’t been all book writing and customer work, though. Today I updated our Training and Events section with lots of new stuff. I am pretty excited, but it also means that I will be on the road from late September until early December. The things I do for you guys 🙂

First up is my 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server class in London via Technitrain from September 28 – October 1. As with all my 4-day deliveries, there are lots of hands on labs (bring your own device, though!). This has been on the books for quite some time. I love London, and my class in 2014 was a blast. I expect this delivery and the students to be the same. I may also be doing something else that week … stay tuned!

I will only be home a few days before heading down to Orlando (a place I *clearly* hate if you know me at all – Disney here I come!) for SQL Saturday 442. On Thursday, October 8, I will be doing a brand new preconference session entitled “Planning Highly Available SQL Server Deployments in a Cloudy, Virtualized World“. This is a “normal” precon, meaning there are no labs like some of my other precons. This helps to keep the price down while I get to deliver a really fun – and timely – topic. On the Saturday of the event, I will be delivering the talk What’s New for High Availability in SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016 – another new one I am putting together.

The next thing on the books is the big kahuna – PASS Summit 2015. I am honored to once again be doing a preconference before Summit. This year I will be delivering “Advanced SQL Server Availability Architectures and Deployments“. I could have done the safe thing and just submitted an updated version of what I did last year. Why rest on your laurels? Don’t get me wrong – having 100 people doing labs at the same time was amazing, but been, there, done that. How could I kick it up a notch? Do something more difficult! Everyone gets their own lab environment (i.e. multiple VMs) that they connect to via a browser pm a device they bring with them. I am finalizing what the labs look like right now and will be building the VMs in the next month. I truly believe for topics like this you need to touch and feel. No hands on makes advanced topics more difficult to learn. Space is limited and I expect another sold out session, so register early. Don’t miss the PASS Summit 2015 Speaker Q&A I did for the precon posted up at the Summit site.

During Summit, I was asked to participate in the panel discussion “Will the DBA Job of the Future Still Involve DBAs?“. That should be a lively panel. For the third year in a row, SQLHA will have a booth (this year once again with Denny Cherry & Associates) called Consultant’s Corner. Drop by to say hello to Max or myself – we’ll both be there. Unlike last year where I was juggling speaking as well as the MVP Summit over in Redmond, I will be in the booth quite a bit this year.

Finally, I am very excited to be returning to Australia for two weeks. The last time I was there was 2013. WardyIT is once again bringing me back as part of their Platinum Training series. I will be delivering my 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server Workshop in Brisbane (November 24 – 27) and Canberra (November 30 – December 3). Every time I go to Australia it is two different cities; the last time I did this combination was in 2012. The last time I was in Brisbane I also spoke at the user group, so we’ll see what happens.

As an aside, both the London and Australia deliveries of the Mission Critical SQL Server class will also be the first time that I will be rolling in some 2016 (both SQL Server and Windows Server) content formally into the curriculm where it is appropriate. My classes are always evolving.

Whew! Are you tired from looking at my schedule yet? I know I’ll be hitting at least Platinum on American with all of those miles in the air. And if all of this was not enough, there are a few other things in the works which are not quite ready to be announced yet. As soon as they are, they will be on the events page.

June 11, 2015

Features Should Not Dictate Mission Critical System Designs

I was working up a new presentation for the upcoming 24 Hours of PASS on mission critical system design (a bit more on that later) when one of those puzzles of life we all have cooking away on the back burners of the mind suddenly snapped into focus. The story of that puzzle goes a little something like this…

The development team ships a great feature called ladders for changing those light bulbs in high ceilings. They also have a fashionable feature called yellow polka dot cloth, which is just perfect for those retro 70s swimming trunks and bikinis that are all the rage. And they put in a cleverly-engineered tricycle feature loved by our active 4 year olds. Nothing at all wrong here.

Yet many times I arrive onsite to help a new customer with their mission critical system only to find that they’ve currently got a three wheeled, yellow polka dot, monster truck jacked up on stilts. I always used to wonder just how on earth they ever got to this point.

Now, thanks to last week’s epiphany, I finally understand. There is a natural tendency of humans to map what they need to what they have – regardless of any actual correlation between the two. There’s probably a law of needs way down the list about this already, and if not there should be because it really is true.

I guess this was correct in most natural situations. If a caveman needed a weapon to fight off a sabertooth tiger, picking one that was close at hand would be a critical survival skill. Clearly this is no time to start with a blank page and work through exactly what the best weapon would be to kill a huge, hungry cat that is looking at you like you are the answer to all his culinary dreams.

But therein lies the real moral of the story, and it’s just as true for DBAs.

Under pressure you’ll have to take the existing features which are, after all, designed to implement high availability and disaster recovery. The funny thing is that this is relative cheap and fast, but just always seems to fit like that sweater your aunt knitted you for Christmas – one sleeve too short, one too long, a bit tight around the neck, and never draping just right.

The features that ship in the product are great. However, chances are that if you sat down and wrote out real wants and needs for your particular applications and environment you would find that those existing features can get you only part of the way to success. Suddenly the gaps that you never saw when you just implemented HA/DR features become all too noticeable. The plan becomes a bit more complex and you wind up using a feature for this, part of a feature for that, writing some scripts over here, and adding a bit of custom hardware over there. It starts to be, well, work. But now the solution fits. It just feels right and does what it should when it should.

Of course, some knowledge always helps, and I mentioned that I was working on a new session for 24 Hours of PASS called “The Art and the Science of Designing a Mission Critical SQL Server Solution”. If you’ve ever thought about taking out that blank page and starting from scratch, I believe you’ll find it gives you some fresh new ideas and a nice starting point.

I hope some of you will join me there on Wednesday, June 24^th at 8PM Pacific/11PM Eastern. Alternatively, feel free to try to fend off that big cat with a convenient tree branch – but we both know down deep that it’s probably going to end with one very happy feline.

If I’ve achieved nothing else, I hope you take away that what you really need is rarely what you have conveniently at hand and that you must actively resist human nature to see that this is the case.

May 21, 2015

Mission Critical SQL Server Book Update – May, 2015

UPDATE – December, 2016 – see this blog post

These days, one of the things everyone asks me is related to the book – mainly “How is it coming?” – a nice way of asking “Is it done yet?” It’s been awhile since the last update, and I figured it is time for a new one. If you are subscribed to the pre-release content, look for new chapters starting the week of May 25 (next week). Everyone who is not subscribed will need to wait for the final, completed book. There is a chance I may decide to put a few preview chapters up, but only when some more hit the pre-release folks; it is only fair.

So why the delay? Writing a book and publishing it on your own is much harder. My previous books were all done through a publisher who had editors and other bits of infrastructure I do not have at my fingertips. For the most part, I am a single threaded, one man show on the production of this book.

When I put the book up for preorder in July of 2013, I had an idea what I was signing myself for because I had written books before. Writing and publishing – especially self-publishing – is a whole different ball game if you want to do it right and not just dump raw Word files into the world and call it a book.

The good news is that I recently found an editor so the book will have a nice level of spit and polish. I’ve worked with her in the past, and am looking forward to seeing what she delivers. Having said that, primary writing and reviews must be completed before I can turn it over to her.

The only thing I can equate this to is when I scored a friend’s musical in the mid-1990s. I had played in tons of pit bands going back to when I started playing bass in 1980, so I figured, “How hard could this be?” Oh, how naïve I was. Between learning the scoring program, writing and arranging for multiple instruments, rehearsals, corrections – you name it. This was not a one day or one week process. I learned a lot, but it was very painful. Arranging got a lot easier after that, and so, too, will any future projects I do in the self-publishing arena.

Add to that my normal day job (consulting, training, as well as running SQLHA with Max), presenting, eating, sleeping, and trying to live my life somewhere in there along with the writing – oy! There just is only so much time and energy I have. However, I do believe all of these things play into one reason I believe that my books have been well received in the past. I bring real world perspective and experience to the table. If I am not doing this stuff for real, it’s just lab work.

For example, Max and I spent the better part of last year working with a large customer on a virtualized SQL Server project which also leveraged quite a few new storage and networking technologies not usually used with SQL Server. What was gained there will be filtered into the book, so you will be getting a lot better content than if I was not also actively doing consulting projects.

In more good news, I have pretty much cleared the decks for the next month or two to get all of the primary writing completed. Chapters need to be reviewed, and then reviewer feedback and corrections incorporated. Once all of the chapters are done, they will be handed off to the editor. Last but not least, all of the final formatting needs to be finished on the edited chapters. This is the entire book process in a nutshell.

Below are some specific questions that I want to address now because I have been asked from time to time. I have also updated the FAQ accordingly.

What content/chapters will the book contain?

While it may change a little, this is the near-final chapter list with my working (read: not final) titles:

Basics of Availability
Data Center Principles
Brief Intro to the SQL Server HA Features
Windows
Networking Part 1
Networking Part 2
Storage Part 1
Storage Part 2
Security
WSFC
Quorum Part 1
Quorum Part 2
Planning FCIs
FCI 2008 R2
FCI 2012
FCI 2014
Scripting Installations
Planning AGs
Implementing AGs
Cluster Admin/Troubleshooting
Backups Part 1
Backups Part 2
Admin/Monitoring
Planning Highly Available Upgrades
Solutions
Building Your Own Virtualized Test Environment

As you can tell, this is quite a bit of content. Right now the book will weigh in somewhere between 1000 and 1500 pages in Word prior to any formatting. Many of these chapters are in process, so those of you that have seen the updates may have only seen a few chapters but a lot of these are in various states of completion. If you are subscribed to the pre-release content, you’ll see all of this content soon.

When will the book truly be done?

From a timing perspective, assuming no issues or problems, primary writing should be done by July, edits by late August/early September, and then onto formatting. It really should be released on or before PASS Summit 2015. That is what I am working towards, and I see no reason that cannot be achieved.

I know people have been waiting patiently for Mission Critical SQL Server. My mistake in hindsight was putting it up so soon for preorder and not anticipating some of the roadblocks that popped up since putting it up for sale. I know that now, and will never repeat that again. For that, I apologize and I do believe the wait will be worth it.

I paid forever and a day ago – where is my money?

No one has asked, but I’m being forthcoming here – it’s sitting in a bank account earmarked for paying book costs. It’s not long gone. I made sure this happened for a very good reason. I need to pay people like editors 🙂

I subscribed to get updates to the book once it is released – will I still get them?

Yes! Needless to say, I’ll make sure you are taken care of. See the next question for a touch more detail, too.

If you preorder with updates on or before May 31, 2015, look for an e-mail from me soon. Anyone preordering with the updates option post-June 1, 2015, will get updates for the specified term – one year post-book release.

Will you do anything for people who purchased Mission Critical SQL Server a long time ago and have been waiting patiently?

Yes! I’m figuring out what that will be. This is different than the post-release updates. But the same rules will generally apply: pre-May 31, 2015 and post-May 31, 2015. I do appreciate your patience, and trust me, no one wants this done more than me because it is a big thing on my plate. There are other things I’d like to do which cannot get done until the book is complete.

When you first announced the book, you said it would cover through SQL Server 2012. What about 2014 and 2016 now that they are out or announced? How about Windows Server 2016?

Here is even better news. With the book being delayed, SQL Server 2014 is now included in this version. I will touch on a few 2016 (SQL Server and Windows things) but the first updates to the book will arguably be SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016. Once those are released, I’ll examine what needs to be updated or added, and go from there. It is too soon to tell.

Any current discounts?

Yes. 20% until May 31, 2015 off of anything in the store. Code to be entered at checkout: MAY31

March 12, 2015

Upcoming SQL Server Training Events

2015 is shaping up to be a busy year for training, and we’re not half way through yet. I thought I would highlight what is coming up – especially so you could take advantage of the best discounts. All of my classes have hands on labs (bring your own device, details sent after you register), as there is no better way to learn than getting that experience. It is not all talking head (or in this case, Allan).

More dates are hopefully coming – stay tuned! Hope to see you in one of the classes.

March

My 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server class in Philadelphia is in a few weeks. Until 3/15 (this upcoming Monday), you can still get $500 off of the price. Don’t miss this opportunity! It’s going to be a great class.

May

I am teaching my 1-day availability groups class – The Good, Bad, and Ugly of AlwaysOn Availability Groups on 5/29 in New York City. This is one of the official pre-conference sessions for SQL Saturday NYC on 5/30. Until 5/1, there is a $200 discount.

September

The 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server class returns to London. This delivery is put on via Technitrain, and currently has a 100 pound discount until June 1. Click on the link for more info and to register.

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