In the previous blog post, I’ve walked you thru the process of creating the Windows Server 2016 Failover Cluster (WSFC) that is not joined to an Active Directory Domain. It is very important that you get the underlying WSFC properly configured and stabilized before you even attempt to create the SQL Server 2016 Always On Basic Availability Group. The availability and reliability of your SQL Server 2016 Always On Basic Availability Group depends so much on the WSFC.
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 has a pretty decent feature set to achieve cost-effective high availability for your environment and build a reliable disaster recovery solution. Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) and Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) are included in SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition and serve to implement high redundancy level for business-critical databases. In this article, I would like to discuss some differences between these solutions and open the curtain on how it can be done with Software-Defined Storage like Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and VSAN from StarWind (StarWind VSAN).
When Availability Groups were introduced in SQL Server 2012, they were only available in Enterprise Edition. This made it challenging to move from Database Mirroring to Availability Groups, especially if you’re running Standard Edition. To upgrade and migrate from Database Mirroring in Standard Edition, you either choose to upgrade to a more expensive Enterprise Edition license and implement Availability Groups or stick with Database Mirroring and hope that everything works despite being deprecated.
Orchestrator is a workflow management solution for the data center. Orchestrator lets you automate the creation, monitoring, and deployment of resources in your environment. Orchestrator is also known as “SCORCH” or “SCO”. Orchestrator uses a drag and drop graphical interface to allow admins to define runbooks. A runbook is a compilation of routine procedures and operations that Orchestrator will run depending on your scheduling. Finally, Orchestrator is capable of managing multiple operating systems. After reading this guide, you should have a basic understanding of how to upgrade/install Orchestrator.
Thanks to the previous part, we have SQL Server 2016 installed and configured. Before running the SCCM installation process, let’s remember the architecture we are implementing.