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What is your MS SQL High Availability / Disaster Recovery Plan?

We know we have HA Engines for our pollers, but what do you do with your MS SQL? What is your fail-over plan? 

Parents
  • SQL AlwaysOn is the recommended solution for Orion HA, though SQL Clustering is another popular option.

  • aLTeReGo​, are there any Solarwinds specific instructions for setting up the SQL AlwaysOn? While trying to configure AlwaysOn for a new install, it asks for a database. However, as this is a fresh install, there is no database yet. So my thought process is, install Orion on what will be our primary application server, so it build the database on one of the SQL servers (SQL Server A).  Then set up the AlwaysOn for that database to replicate/move to a SQL server (SQL Server B) that can be read from both our data centers.  After that, we'd rerun the config wizard to see the database that's AlwaysOn, on SQL Server B?

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  • aLTeReGo​, are there any Solarwinds specific instructions for setting up the SQL AlwaysOn? While trying to configure AlwaysOn for a new install, it asks for a database. However, as this is a fresh install, there is no database yet. So my thought process is, install Orion on what will be our primary application server, so it build the database on one of the SQL servers (SQL Server A).  Then set up the AlwaysOn for that database to replicate/move to a SQL server (SQL Server B) that can be read from both our data centers.  After that, we'd rerun the config wizard to see the database that's AlwaysOn, on SQL Server B?

Children
  • There's no special configuration on the Orion side needed. Simply specify listener name of the SQL AlwaysOn availability group rather than SQL instance name in database step of Configuration Wizard and away you go.

  • But with a new install, as there is no database to point to, would the order of operations be, install solarwinds to build the database, then build the Availability group for AlwaysOn? Or is there a way to build the alwayson so that we don't need to have a database yet? I just don't see a way, at the moment, to build the alwayson without specifying a database.

    Thanks!

  • When you run the installer and choose the 'Advanced' or 'Production' installation option, SQL Express is not installed and you are prompted to provide connection information to your existing SQL database server. You are also given the option in the Wizard in this mode to create a new database or choose an existing Orion database. There you would create a new database and give it a name.

  • That's how we plan on building the database, but the alwayson listener is making us select a database before we can build the listener.

    So we will....
    1. Build the Database via the config wizard pointing to one of our SQL servers (SQL server A)

    2. Build the AlwaysOn listener pointing to the Database Orion created on (SQL server A)

    3. Rerun the config wizard to use the AlwaysOn listener address.

    Correct? or is there something i'm not getting....

    Thanks!

  • I spoke about this with another guy on my team, and he said that we could always create the database without any content, manually, and build the alwayson using that.  I never thought of that. So now i see why you're saying we would only need to run the config wizard once. I was getting confused thinking that we had to have orion create the database first.  Thanks for your help aLTeReGo​! We're still going to go with the method i've mentioned above, but it's good to know that we can build the alwayson listener with a manually created database first, then have Solarwinds use and add to that database during the config wiz.