Greetings, fellow sysadmins and everyone who is still wondering how to make their SQL server highly available! You’re just in time since I’ve prepared for you detailed guidelines with pictures and explanations on how to achieve this goal by using the SQL Server AlwaysOn approach! The great thing is that we are also going to configure and review the full-fledged system with the disaster recovery scenarios implemented. I’ve decided to break this topic into 3 parts. First, we will go through the process of configuring AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance (FCI), the next part of this series will cover the deployment of a DR site for our cluster using AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and finally, we will learn more about how to achieve the same using 3rd party software.

There are lots of great materials on optimization of virtualized environments that I think many of you will enjoy reading about. Such topics are all over the IT community and they cover a wide range of the technical questions. This article will focus on the matter which is not quite clear yet, especially when it comes from theory to practice. It’s about Windows Disk write cache feature and its implications for data consistency and performance of the virtual hard drives.