Hi,
We are planning to upgrade our current SQL 2005 cluster to SQL 2012 cluster. The SQL 2005 primary cluster has 4 instances on 3 nodes (2 instances on an Active, 2 instances on an active and passive), the DR cluster has 4 instances to do mirroring for primary 4 instances (4 instances on active and passive). Our plan is to build a new SQL 2012 cluster with 4 nodes (2 instances on an Active, 2 instances on an active,passive and DR always on node). The first 3 nodes will have shared storage, the DR always on node has its dedicated storage. My questions are:
1. Does the design have any issue? Windows cluster can be failed over automatically in the first 3 nodes, for example, we do patching on any of nodes, or any node has some issues. SQL always on can be failed manually, for example we lost shared storage.
2. Do we still need to build another server/cluster for DB mirroring?
3. do we need extra license cost if we do not want to do backup/reporting on always on node?
Thanks
David