WSFC cluster: Configure a SQL Servers cluster with AlwaysON Availability Groups -1

In this tutorial we are going to see how to install and configure a SQL Servers cluster with AlwaysON availability groups . To do this, we are going to roughly treat what an availability group is and what utilities it has.

AlwaysON Availability Groups
Availability groups are a feature of SQL servers that was implemented starting with SQL SERVER 2012. This feature maximizes the availability of a set of SQL instances up to nine of them, a primary read-write replica and up to eight replicas high schools. This feature can be used in two different ways:

• High Availability (HA): This option enables failover, or Failover , in case there is a problem with the primary replica instance. This Failover is not affected by a database malfunction, such as a lost file or a corrupted transactional log.
• Read-only access – As the name suggests, the primary instance's DBs are copied to the other instances of SQL Server for read-only workloads.

 
We will focus on the first option that we have explained.

In order to use AlwaysON Availability Groups, you must have a Windows Server Failover Cluster known as WSFC , as each availability replica must reside on a node of the WSFC cluster. In the event that one WSFC cluster needs to be migrated to another, the availability group can occupy two clusters at the same time.

Initial considerations
In this tutorial we will work with three servers, a domain controller and two failover nodes with Windows Server 2019 and SQL Server 2019 STD Edition on the two cluster nodes. Both nodes have to be joined to the domain and we must also have generated an AD user so that there is communication between them.

WSFC cluster in AlwaysON Availability Groups
Installing the Failover clustering feature
First, we will add the “ Failover Clustering ” feature and, for this, we go to the “ Server Manager ” and click on the following option:

We add the feature:

We install by checking the “ Restart … if required.

We have to carry out this process on both servers.

Create the WSFC cluster
Once the feature is installed and the server is restarted, we can create the cluster. To do this we return to the “ Server Manager ”:

The WSFC cluster management window will open. To generate a new cluster, click on the “ Create Cluster ” option:

The creation wizard will open and we only have to add the servers as we see in the following image:

We validate that the cluster can be carried out. This process does not require us to configure anything:

A new wizard opens, which we leave the default options:

Nothing happens if there is a warning in the final report, this will not prevent the creation of the cluster as we see in the following image:

Once the validation of the servers is finished, we give the cluster a name and its IP:

We verify that all the configuration is correct and we finish the process of creating the cluster:

In the “ Failover Cluster Manager ” we can see the cluster that we just created:

With this, we would finish the guide to generate a WSFC cluster and be able to use it to generate AlwaysON availability groups. In the next post, we will explain how we will create this cluster.

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