I’ll be doing a precon for SQLSaturday #331 in Denver Colorado on September 19th, 2014 titled “A Day of High Availability and Disaster Recovery” .  If you can make it, I would love to have you in the class.  We are going to cover backups, windows clustering, AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and more.  This class will take each of those technologies in a progressive order to build on each other.  At the end of the day we will have a single solution built out in virtual machines on my laptop that use all of those technologies to build a comprehensive and real world high availability and disaster recovery architecture.  Click the button below to register and I have included the session abstract as well.

Let’s spend a day looking at several High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for SQL Server. We’ll start off with a solid foundation as we look at backups and how to both configure and performance tune them. After we build our foundation, we’ll take a look at SQL Server Mirroring and why it’s still an important tool in our tool box. Since all of the HA/DR solutions we will be looking at either sit on top of or can be combined with Windows Failover Clustering, we’ll learn how to setup and configure a windows cluster to host these solutions. Next we’ll build on that platform by looking at SQL Server AlwaysOn Failover Clustering Instances. Last we’ll dive into how to setup SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Once we have a firm understanding of all these technologies we’ll see how they all work together by discussing a case study together and developing a comprehensive solution. Here’s what you will learn:

SQL Server backup types
SQL Server recovery models
How to design a backup plan
How to performance tune your backups for free
How to configure mirroring
Mirroring configuration tips to increase throughput
Setup and Configure a Windows Failover Cluster
Discover how to properly configure quorum to support the AlwaysOn feature set
Setup and Configure a SQL AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance
Setup and Configure a SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group

 UPDATE

I thought I would post an update after the event.  The class went great and we had some excellent discussions!  5pm came up on us really fast and although I had covered all the material, I had some more demos.  I offered to stay and go through them and about 7 of the 15 attendees decided to hang around.  I kept going for another hour before we got kicked out of the facility.  It was a fantastic day and I had an absolute blast.  I had added a case study for us to go over and see how many ways we could solve the business requirements, but we simply didn’t have time for that.  The feedback that I got was excellent and not a single negative thing was mentioned, in fact here is a testimonial from one of the attendees.

Testimonial

This past weekend was SQL Saturday #331 Denver. I always enjoy SQL Saturdays, but I was especially looking forward to this weekend because I was going to attend a SQL Saturday Pre-Con for the first time! The pre-con was fantastic! The Denver SQL Server User Group did an outstanding job, and it was a wonderful day of learning and networking.

I attended Ryan Adams’ session A Day of High Availability and Disaster Recovery. Ryan did an excellent job with this all-day session. You could tell that his agenda was carefully planned to build upon each module. Ryan’s first module was an in-depth tour of backups and restores, pointing out that these concepts were foundational to all High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions. In his next module, Ryan expanded on backup/restores as he introduced us to mirroring. Ryan then walked us through the concept of Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). Culminating in his module on AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups, Ryan tied all the concepts together providing a holistic view of HA/DR. I would definitely recommend this all-day session to anyone looking to expand his or her knowledge of HA/DR. To find out more about Ryan Adams, you should check out his blog at ryanjadams.com.