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Building Clusters to Protect SQL Server in Cloud Configurations

David Bermingham Senior Technical Evangelist, SIOS Technology

Microsoft Cloud & Datacenter MVP (2010-Present)

Dave Bermingham

• Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVP (2010-current)

• Founder of www.clusteringformeremortals.com• SIOS Technology Senior Technical Evangelist

(2004-current)– Focused on helping customers deploy HA and DR

solutions on Windows Servers

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Agenda

• Cloud SLA– Azure, AWS

• Potential Points of Failure• SQL Server HA Options

– AlwaysOn Failover Clusters– AlwaysOn Availability Groups

• Cloud Infrastructure– Availability Zones, Availability Sets

• SIOS Product Demonstration

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Cloud SLA

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Azure’s SLA

99.95% (~22 minutes month)...but read the fine print

• Only applies to two or more instances in an “Availability Set”– Provides “dial-tone” to the instance

• But wait….what about the storage?– 99.9% write guarantee (~44 minutes month)

• What about SQL Server?– No guarantee…you must manage SQL Server Availability

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AWS SLA

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Potential Points of Failure

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The Bottom Line on High Availability

The Cloud

AzureVirtual

MachineService

Internet Access

GeographicRegion

Availability Set• Fault Domain• Update Domain• Load Balancer

VMInstance

Storage SQL Services AD/DNS Networking

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What is your plan for an

outage of “The Cloud”?

If your applications are in “The

Cloud” what happens if

your clients lose internet connectivity?

How do you maintain uptime for planned maintenance and unplanned outages?

What steps can you take

to ensure your data

stays online?

How can you ensure your SQL Server

Service stays online?

How can you ensure Active Directory and DNS Services are available?

Is your vNet up and running?

Who has access to firewalls and

Network Security Groups

(NSG)?

Redundancy is not enough

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Web and application services in different

geographic locations in the cloud

Load balancers in front of Web or Application servers

Availability Zone 1 Availability Zone 2

What about the Data Tier?

Microsoft SQL Server cannot be made redundant with a simple load balancer and multiple instances in different Availability Zones

Databases such as SQL Serverneed additional configuration

SQL Server HA Options

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What are Your Choices for SQL Server High Availability (HA) in the Cloud?

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AlwaysOn Availability Groups SANLess Failover Clustering

• HA feature introduced in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition

• An evolution of SQL Server Database Mirroring

• An alternative to AlwaysOn Failover Clustering

vs

• AlwaysOn Failover Clustering - included in both SQL Server Enterprise

and Standard Edition

• Delivers HA and robust data protection features for a fraction of the cost of AlwaysOn Availability Groups

SANLess Cluster vs. Availability GroupsAlwaysOn

Availability GroupsPre-SQL 2016

#SANLess Cluster

Support SQL Standard Edition 0 4

Distributed Transactions 0 4

Unlimited Databases 0 4

Protects System Databases (Master, MSDB, etc) 0 4

Eases Database Administration 0 4

Support more than 2-nodes in failover configuration 0 4

Replicates Data other than SQL 0 4

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SANLess Cluster vs. Availability GroupsAlwaysOn

Availability GroupsSQL 2016

#SANLess Cluster

Support SQL Standard Edition 1 4

Distributed Transactions 1 4

Unlimited Databases 0 4

Protects System Databases (Master, MSDB, etc) 0 4

Eases Database Administration 0 4

Support more than 2-nodes in failover configuration 2 4

Replicates Data other than SQL 0 4

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Poll Question #1What do you currently use for high availability for SQL

Server (on premises)?

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Cloud Infrastructure

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SQL SQL FSW

DC1 DC2

WEB1 WEB2 WEB3

Fault Domain

Update Domain

Availability Set

Fault Domain

Fault Domain

Failover

Fault Domain

Block Replication acrossFault Domains

DC2File Share Witness

SQL 1 SQL 2

Windows Azure-West#SANLess Failover Cluster

Windows AzureCloud Service

Regional or Cloud Outage Protection

Node 1 Node 2

Synchronopus Replication to Local nodes

Asynchronous replication to Off-Site DR Node

Failover

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Azure Region Pairs

Region 1 Region 2

East US West US

East US 2 Central US

North Central US South Central US

West Central US West US 2

Canada East Canada Central

Brazil South South Central US

US Gov Iowa US Gov Virginia

US DoD East US DoD Central

North Europe West Europe

UK West UK South

Germany Central Germany Northeast

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Availability Zone 2

Availability Zone 3

Failover

Availability Zone 1

Block Replication acrossAvailability Zones

DC2File Share Witness

SQL 1 SQL 2

VPC#SANLess Failover Cluster

Amazon EC2Cloud Service

Poll Question #2What cloud platform do you currently use?

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Demonstrate Automated Deployments

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SIOS DataKeeper Overview

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Traditional Failover Cluster

Single Point of Failure

Failover

Not Available in the Cloud

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SIOS Software Enables “SANLess” Windows Server Failover Clusters

• Traditional failover clustering requires shared storage

• Shared storage is not available in public clouds or not practical (VMware) or cost-effective

• SIOS SANLess clusters use locally attached storage – no SAN required

• A SIOS DataKeeper Volume resource emulates a Physical Disk resource, allowing shared nothing clusters for any cluster workload

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SQLSERVER

FAILOVER

SQL SERVER

storage

storage storage

SQL SERVER

Replication

Synchronous or AsynchronousLow Latency Block Replication

Between Server Nodes

Replication

Failover

SANLess Clustering with DataKeeper

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SANLess Clustering with DataKeeper

Synchronous or AsynchronousLow Latency Block Replication

Between Server Nodes

Replication

Failover

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1. 2.

SANLess Clustering with DataKeeper

3.

Multisite Cluster with Hybrid Cloud

Synchronous or AsynchronousLow Latency Block Replication

Between Server Nodes

Failover Failover

Replication

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SANLess Clustering in AWS

Node1 Node2

Failover

Replication Across Availability Zones

Availability Zone3

Availability Zone2Availability Zone1

Witness

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Azure-West

SANLess Clustering in Azure

SQL 1 SQL 2

Failover

Replication Across Fault Domains

DC2File Share Witness

Fault Domain

Fault DomainFault Domain

LifeKeeper

High Availability Failover Clustering

Supports Single or Multi-Site Configs

Leverage any backend storage (FC SAN, iSCSI, NAS, etc)

Automatic or Push Button failover

DataKeeper

Host Based, block level replication

Enables Clustering without shared Storage

Synchronous or Asynchronous modes

Application Recovery Kits

Application level monitoring/failover

Out of the box, Wizard based setup

SIOS Protection Suite for LinuxSPS for Linux - Overview

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Enables High Availability for

SQL Server running

on Linux!

SPS Linux Deployment in Azure

• 3 Nodes in an Availability Set– 2 Cluster nodes + Witness Server– Communication Paths (aka heartbeats)

between all 3 systems

• Witness Server protects against split-brain

• Data replicated between cluster nodes in real-time

• Internal Load Balancer (ILB) configured for client redirection

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Customer Use Cases

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SAP on Azure:

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The Company• Worldwide leader in software, services

devices and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential

• Primary OS: Windows

The Challenge• Migrating SAP environment to Hyper-V,

followed by Azure - need to maintain high availability on SAP components (must be SAP Certified)

The Solution• Added SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

software to WSFC to build 2-node failover clusters in both Hyper-V and Azure

• Efficient, real time replication synchronizes storage between servers

Large Software Company

SQL and SAP on Azure:

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The Company• Zespri the world’s largest marketer of

kiwifruit with operations in more than 53 countries.

• Primary OS: Windows

The Challenge• Move large SAP and SQL infrastructure

operations which manage operations within multiple countries to AZURE

• Must be SAP Certified

The Solution• Added SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

software to WSFC to build 2-node failover clusters to protect SQL Server and SAP ASCS

• SIOS High Availability enabled for Dev, UAT and Production SAP and SQL Server environments

• Efficient, real time replication synchronizes storage between servers

Zespri

SAN and SANLess Clusters

• Meet challenging demands of the data center shift to the virtual and cloud instances

• Eliminate customer need to sacrifice VMware features when enabling guest clusters

• “Lift and shift” on-premises configuration into the cloud• Eliminate costly re-architecture of infrastructure and

applications when moving to the cloud

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SIOS High Availability Solution Value:

Learn More and Get a Free Trial of SIOS DataKeeper:

us.sios.com/products/sios_datakeeper/windows

SIOS Technology

Twitter: @SIOSTechCall Toll Free: 866.318.0108

Dave BerminghamMicrosoft Cloud & Datacenter MVP (2010-2016)Senior Technical Evangelist, SIOS Technology

Blog: www.clusteringformeremortals.comTwitter: @DaveBermEmail: David.Bermingham@us.sios.com

Today’s Presenter:

http://us.sios.com

Thank you.

Copyright @ 2017 SIOS Technology Corp. All rights reserved.