Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

New Availability Features

One of the key new features in SQL Server 2012 is the AlwaysOn availability features. The new AlwaysOn features provide SQL Server administrators more power and flexibility in their efforts toward providing both high availability and disaster recovery. The AlwaysOn features consist of AlwaysOn Availability Groups and AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances.

AlwaysOn Availability Groups support a failover environment for a discrete set of user databases that fail over together. A single SQL Server instance can host multiple availability groups. In the event of a failure, each availability group can be configured to fail over to different SQL Server instances. For example, one availability group can fail over to instance 2, ...