In this lesson, we'll configure AlwaysOn AGs on a three node Windows Server Failover Cluster. We'll first look at the prerequisites for the setup and will then do the following:
Set up four Hyper-V VMs; one VM will act as a domain controller and the other three will be the availability group replicas
Set up AlwaysOn AGs
The AlwaysOn topology to be configured is shown in the following diagram. This is the same topology as discussed earlier in this lesson:
Figure 4.6: AlwaysOn topology
As a part of the AlwaysOn availability setup, we'll also configure a domain controller. In a real-world scenario, configuring a domain controller and Windows Server Failover Cluster is part of a System Administrator's job.
We'll also talk about modifying an existing availability group such as adding/removing a database from an availability group, modifying backup preferences, and adding a new replica.