SQL Server Availability Group - Failover for Patching?

  • Morning All,

    We have a maintenance Window weekly of a couple of hours - At the moment when I am patching or need to down one of the replicas I set automatic failover to false and then do whatever needs doing (in this case patching and memory (re)throttling. Then I started to wonder if this is the correct way of doing it?

    Should I be altering automatic failover when rebooting/restarting during a planned maintenance window? Is there a better method?

    Cheers
    Alex

  • Hi Alex,

    it does not matter if you keep the automatic fail over to true or false as long as you perform the operation on the passive node. If you want to be on the sure side that nothing goes wrong, you can also disable it.
    If have a clustered instance with an availability group on a standalone instance acting as secondary. I patch the standalone instance, review after patching/restart the AG still synchronizing and afterwards start patching the the clustered instance by starting with the passive node.
    I don't know if you have the same configuration or you have only standalone instances. Be aware that AGs on standalone instances do not fail over automatically when database related errors occur (for example the disk for the user database is no longer available).

  • As long as you remember to set it back to the desired setting.

    I know some people like to also suspend data movement when doing patches.

    Personally, I think it is a matter of preference.

    Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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