How To: Always On Availability Groups

The cachebuilder has undergone extensive reworking to work optimally with AOGs - including:

• It will no longer toggle between recovery modes
• Performance boosts (we've seen it run more than 20x faster)
• Significant change to how it syncs data - for nearly everything it will simply perform a delta - however, it will still need to regularly (default: every 24 hours) rebuild group membership by communicating with your AD servers, and rebuild role-based access based on changes to your user-roles.
  • This means that there is a huge reduction in the amount of bandwidth required by the cachebuilder - which is highly desirable if you want to set up an AOG in Windows Azure (bandwidth = $$$)

These changes make it highly resilient in the event of a failover - in most cases it will resume normal operation within a minute or two (although you will likely see some errors in the logs).

There are still some optimizations, changes, and possibly some bug fixes that will happen as we roll out support for this major feature, but if you wish to begin using this feature, simply change the connection strings in your Web.config and cachebuilder config files to point at your AOG instance.

It is recommended that you add this to your connection string (just append it to the end):

Server=sql;Database=ServiceManager;Trusted_Connection=True;Connection Timeout=150;

If you're using an AOG inside Windows Azure, you'll need to change your connection string to communicate over TCP, and you'll need to use a SQL login rather than Windows Auth. e.g.:

Server=tcp:CLOUD SERVICE ENDPOINT;Database=ServiceManagement;User ID=USERNAME;Password=PASSWORD;Trusted_Connection=False;Connection Timeout=150;

In the future, we will provide extensive documentation and tutorials to assist with setting up and configuring AOGs inside Windows Azure, but for now you're on your own.