We are in a real disaster situation with two servers using Availability Groups.
Last night we patched both nodes of a two node Availability Group cluster but what was the primary replica did not come up again because of a hardware issue. This caused a number of messages on the seconday replica mostly ones like these:-AlwaysOn Availability Groups: Waiting for local Windows Server Failover Clustering node to start. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.
All our Availability Group databases show Recovery Pending and the Availability Group itself shows Resolving as does the only Availability Replica and we no longer have any Availability databases or Availability Group Listeners. From other posts here this may not be such a bad thing as with no database access no data can be written to any database causing transaction log activity that would not be offloaded until it could be replicated.
If we had wanted to allow access to the databases what would we have been able to do? Could we drop the databases from the Availability Group, not sure how as this option is not available using the GUI. Could we have switched off AlwaysOn High Availability in SQL Server Configuration Manager and most likely stopped/started SQL Server. If this had made the databases available we would later on have to re-join them with the Secondary replica.
As this is supposed to be a High Availability solution it does not look good at this time (fortunately this is just the Development servers).
I am hoping that someone can give some insight into what has happened and how we could approach it again in the future. Are we possibly in this situation because the Secondary node came back up and the primary node could not? Would this be different if it was the Secondary node that failed and the primary node was good?
Thanks
Chris