Now with regard to SQL Server clustering and SQL Server load
balancing, the SQL Server product itself has a feature called
the Always On availability group.
Now, you can run SQL Server databases in a traditional cluster, FCI, or
failover cluster infrastructure, using an SOFS, Scale‑Out File Server,
share just like I mentioned a few minutes ago.
Always On availability groups are similar in principle to the Storage Spaces
Direct and as much as administrators can leverage the database servers own
local storage instead of having for you to shell out for a storage area
network using iSCSI or Fibre Channel like we discussed earlier in the course.
It's an easier way to provide high availability. So what you wind up with in
your failover clusters,
you've got your SQL Server nodes that are running the SQL Server
database engine, but they're hosting those databases locally, as you can
see. And when you configure an Always On availability group, you do that
within the SQL Server control plane,
you wind up with a one primary and one or more secondary instances, and those
databases are all internally synchronized with each other.
You see the benefit here? So you're avoiding that dependency on
external shared storage, and you can failover from primary to
secondary, and it's called an availability group because you can
failover multiple databases together.
Now, the availability group feature uses a listener IP
address to address that virtual cluster in a similar way
to how in failover clustering, you create a client access point.
Again, Tim,
why are you mentioning this? Especially, you might know that Microsoft has a separate SQL Server database administrator certification.