Hello,
We are implementing sql server 2012 availability groups (AG). Our secondary databases are not accessible in order to save licenses.
We have a lot of issues concerning monitoring, backup and SSIS. They all come down to the fact that they want basic information from the secondary, that is not accessible. We are implementing SSIS, which is supported on AG, but the SSISDB is encrypted.
Backup problem
The secondary instance does not know anything about the backups made in the primary instance. After a failover differential backups fail.
SSIS problem:
There is a blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mattm/archive/2012/09/19/ssis-with-alwayson.aspx) that suggest to make a job that checks whether the status has changed from secondary to primary. If so, you can decrypt and encrypt again. This job has to be executed every minute. Which is way too much effort for an event that happens once in a while. There are a few other problems with this solution. The phrase "use ssisdb" has to be included in the a job step. And the jobstep fails. The secondary is not accessible.
Monitoring problems:
We use Microsoft tooling for monitoring: SCOM. Scom does not recognize a non readable secondary and tries to login continuously.
There are a few solutions that I can think of:
- sql server build in failover trigger
- Special status of secondary database.
Failover trigger:
We would like a build-in failover trigger, in stead of a time based job, that starts a few standard maintenance actions if only at the time (or directly after) a failover has occurred. Because now our HA cluster is not really high available until :
- SSISDB works and is accessible after failover
- Backup information is synchronised
- SCOM monitoring skips the secondary database (scom produces loads of login failures)
Does anyone have any suggestion how to fix this?