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This section describes the Microsoft SQL Server lab setup and design that is used for the backup and recovery use cases:
Figure 5. Windows Failover Cluster (WSFC) and SQL Server Failover Cluster instances (FCI)
The production site (Site 1) is deployed with a three node Windows Failover cluster (WSFC) that has one active directory and DNS server and two cluster shared volumes attached. WSFC is a group of independent Windows servers (cluster nodes) that work together to increase the availability of cluster roles, which are typically applications (such as SQL Server) and services (such as networking and storage). WSFC acts as a high availability solution that automatically makes the cluster role easily available on the healthy node in the cluster.
WSFC leverages Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) functionality to share the storage from any node in the cluster. This improves the speed of the cluster role availability from one node to other easily because of shared storage. In this setup, the data and log volumes are configured as cluster-shared volumes (CSV) for WSFC. These volumes are provisioned from PowerFlex storage.
Microsoft SQL Server FCI uses WSFC to provide a high availability database solution. This helps SQL Server instances to be intentionally moved or automatically failed over between WSFC nodes. If there was a failure of any resources on one node, the SQL FCI is moved to a healthy node in which the SQL instances can resume database operations smoothly.
In the following example of Database refresh, the Dev/Test site (Site 2) has a smaller setup that is deployed with two node Windows Failover Cluster (WSFC) along with one Active Directory (AD)/DNS server and two volumes that are configured as a cluster shared volume. These volumes are the snapshots of the data and log volume from Site 1.
Microsoft SQL Server FCI is configured across WSFC nodes to provide a high availability database solution. On the network, a failover cluster instance (FCI) appears to be an instance of SQL Server running on a single system, but the SQL Server FCI provides failover from one WSFC node to another if the current node becomes unavailable. SQL Server FCI leverages solutions like WSFC cluster disks and server message block (SMB) to run its database operations as a high availability system.
As shown in the above figure, both Site 1 and Site 2 are using the same PowerFlex cluster to provision shared storage for WSFC and in turn, to the database and log volumes that are deployed as SQL Server FCI.
Lab setup and design that is used to demonstrate the T-SQL snapshot backup feature is a good example of HA production, but this feature can also be used with the simple stand-alone SQL server deployment.