I was recently interviewed by VMblog about high availability options for SQL Server. You can check out the interview here http://vmblog.com/ For the step by step guide I previously published, check it out here https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2018/01/10/how-to-build-a-sanless-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance-in-google-cloud-platform/ ... continue reading

With the introduction of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition a new feature called Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) was introduced. At a very high level, this solution allows you to pool together locally attached storage and present it to the cluster as a CSV ... continue reading

If you are going to host SQL Server on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) you will want to make sure it is highly available. One of the best and most economical ways to do that is to build a SQL ... continue reading

You may have heard about the recent storage outage that impacted some instances in the US East region back on March 16th. A root cause analysis of the outage is posted here. March 16th US East Storage Outage Customer impact: ... continue reading

At Microsoft Ignite this past September, Microsoft made some announcements around Azure. One of these announcements was the general availability of multiple VIPs on internal load balancers. Why is this so important to a SQL Server DBA? Well, up until ... continue reading

Before we look at the new quorum features in Windows Server 2016, I think it is important to know where we came from. In my previous post Understanding the Windows Server Failover Cluster Quorum in Windows Server 2012 R2 I ... continue reading

If you are like me, I try to make my Azure MSDN subscription credits stretch the entire month. I’m typically just building labs to try out new features or to demonstrate SQL Server Failover Clusters in Azure. A lot of ... continue reading

With Microsoft’s recent release of the first public preview of MS SQL Server running on Linux, I wondered what they would do for high availability. Knowing how tightly coupled AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Clustering is to the Windows operating ... continue reading

In this post we will detail the specific steps required to deploy a 2-node File Server Failover Cluster in a single region of Azure using Azure Resource Manager. I will assume you are familiar with basic Azure concepts as well ... continue reading