I need assistance choosing the proper features to address my design requirements. Thank-you in advance.
Requirements and current state:
- Use of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise or 2012
- Use of SQL Server 2012 Enterprise
- Infrastructure being built on VMware ESXi 5.0 server virtualization
- Database must be readable/writable at both data centers simultaneous
- Changes at one datacenter must be synchronized at the other ASAP
- 100Mbit MPLS (35-40ms RTT) between data centers
- New custom built application has 99.999% SLA
- application HTTPS workloads already operating at 99.999% uptime and availability
- Assume 1 DB
- Requires site HA, active/passive
- Clients will be pointed at a specific data center via GSLB (Citrix Netscaler)
- FC SAN at both locations, application consistent replication available (EMC Clariion + Recoverpoint CE)
Question 1: What features/functionality will enable this DB to be writeable in each data center, while at the same time having those changes replicated/synchronized near real-time?
Question 2: How does AlwaysOn availability groups work with hardware (non-MS) GSLB? Is it possible to target a FCI at a specific data center or can you only use the AlwaysOn IP for the entire multi-subnet FCI?
Question 3: What features/functionality exist to scale out (add additional SQL servers) write requests? I believe you can utilize AlwaysOn replica's to scale out read's, but I haven't been able to find any information on scaling out writes.