How you SHOULD perform a manual fail-over of a SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group

Since the arrival of BizTalk Server 2016, Microsoft added support for SQL AlwaysOn. It still is new to many BizTalk operators, administrators and developers. Often having been dealing with older versions of BizTalk.
Not many people have been dealing with SQL AlwaysOn already, so this post is for non-BizTalk geeks as well…

There was always the need for high available SQL environments. Companies want their data and systems running in a way that downtime can be minimized and SQL Server has a lot of solutions to that problem, one of them being SQL AlwaysOn.

When having dealt with a SQL Failover Cluster before, you might be tempted to use the Failover Cluster Manager to fail-over an availability group, however this is NOT a good choice when dealing with SQL AlwaysOn…

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Windows 2016 Failover Cluster Services now has load balancing (enabled by default)

Having a production system with “new technology” is always keen to give you some issues you didn’t know about earlier on.

Lately, due to the arrival of BizTalk Server 2016 and related support for Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016, we’ve seen some things we did calculate for.

It seems the Failover Cluster Manager now has built-in support for automatic load balancing: