End-to-end build of SQL Server Always On Availability Groups: Hyper-V VMs, SQL 2022 + SSMS install, Windows Failover Clustering setup, AG database creation, listener VNN, replica synchronization, availability check and manual failover testing.
7 articles • follow them in order
SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG) are the modern HA + DR primitive for SQL workloads. Two or more SQL nodes hold synchronized copies of the same database. A…
With both VMs built and joined to the domain in Part 1, the next step is installing SQL Server 2022 + SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) on both nodes. Identical…
SQL Server Always On Availability Groups require a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) underneath. The AG itself doesn’t move shared storage around — it replicates databases. But the cluster service…
SQL Server is installed on both nodes (Part 2) and the WSFC is up (Part 3). Two more prerequisites before we can build the AG itself: Enable the Always On…
This is the part where everything we built in Parts 1–4 finally becomes an Availability Group. Two SQL nodes, a Windows Failover Cluster, AlwaysOn enabled, demodb in FULL recovery with…
The AG is built (Part 5). Now we verify it actually works: replication is happening, the secondary is receiving log records, reads work on the secondary (Enterprise readable secondary feature),…
The AG is healthy and replicating (verified in Part 6). The whole point of building this is failover — so we exercise it now. Three tests in this part: Manual…
