Walking you through step-by-step how to do so, we then demonstrate how using Amazon FSx to run SQL Server Always On deployments helps you reduce complexity and cost. Then we talk about why the preferred option for high availability deployments has traditionally been difficult to deploy and manage. In this blog post, we first provide a brief background on the deployment options for SQL Server Always On. This new capability enables you to simplify your SQL Server Always On deployments by using fully managed, highly available shared storage on Amazon FSx to host your databases. Along with this launch, we also introduced support for SMB Continuously Available (CA) file shares.
Native support makes it easy to deploy Windows file storage in AWS with high availability and redundancy across multiple Availability Zones. We introduced native support for multi-Availability Zone file system deployments on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server (Amazon FSx). These features reduce complexity and cost of running SQL Server Always On deployments. We recently introduced new features on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to simplify deploying and using shared storage to host your databases. This difficulty stems from it requiring shared storage to enable the secondary node to continue to have access to the database storage upon a failover, without the need to replicate data between the nodes. SQL Server Always On (specifically, the Failover Cluster Instance deployment option, which is the preferred deployment option for high availability) has been traditionally difficult to deploy and manage. Microsoft SQL Server provides a set of features under the umbrella of SQL Server Always On to enable such redundant, high availability deployments.
If the primary fails, the cluster automatically fails over to the secondary, thus ensuring continued database activity for your applications. With a high availability setup, you have a cluster of two nodes with a primary and a secondary. The high availability requirement demands that there are no single points of failure in the SQL Server deployment architecture. Running business-critical applications often requires Microsoft SQL Server databases to be highly available. Customers have been running their Windows workloads on AWS for over a decade.