Always On Availability Groups is a high availability and disaster recovery feature that was introduced in SQL Server 2012. This feature, similar to Always On Failover Cluster Instances, requires a Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to be configured on the nodes running on the SQL Server. Availability Groups work at a database level, where the Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) are protecting the whole instance.
We won't focus on the WSFC anymore and just use the common platform to deploy the SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in the following scenarios through the chapter. The WSFC configuration for the Availability Groups is more simple when compared to the FCI infrastructure, since Availability Groups don't require any shared storage and the storage solution depends on the node type. To utilize the Availability Groups...
