Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Management and Administration, Second Edition

Chapter 10. Implementing and Managing AlwaysOn Availability Groups

In SQL Server 2012, a majority of the investments made to high availability and disaster recovery are tailored toward AlwaysOn, specifically the new availability groups capability. As such, it makes sense to leverage availability groups. But let’s not stop there. Availability groups are growing in popularity for a number of reasons: They offer multiple replicas—one primary replica and up to four secondary replicas—and provide a single virtual network name for clients and applications to connect with; they make it possible for multiple databases to fail over as a single unit, and organizations can increase hardware utilization by leveraging secondary replicas for read-only operations ...