ON WINDOWS SERVER 2008 R2 IN AZURE
INTRO
On July 9, 2019, support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 will end. That means the end of regular security updates. However, if you move those SQL Server instances to Azure, Microsoft will give you three years of Extended Security Updates at no additional charge. If you are currently running SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 and you are unable to update to a later version of SQL Server before the July 9th deadline, you will want to take advantage of this offer rather than running the risk of facing a future security vulnerability. An unpatched instance of SQL Server could lead to data loss, downtime or a devastating data breach.
One of the challenges you will face when running SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 in Azure is ensuring high availability. On premises you may be running a SQL Server Failover Cluster (FCI) instance for high availability, or possibly you are running SQL Server in a virtual machine and are relying on VMware HA or a Hyper-V cluster for availability. When moving to Azure, none of those options are available. Downtime in Azure is a very real possibility that you must take steps to mitigate.
In order to mitigate the possibility of downtime and qualify for Azure’s 99.95% or 99.99% SLA, you have to leverage SIOS DataKeeper. DataKeeper overcomes Azure’s lack of shared storage and allows you to build a SQL Server FCI in Azure that leverages the locally attached storage on each instance. SIOS DataKeeper not only supports SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as documented in this guide, it supports any version of Windows Server, from 2008 R2 through Windows Server 2019 and any version of SQL Server from from SQL Server 2008 through SQL Server 2019.
This guide will walk through the process of creating a two-node SQL Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) in Azure, running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Although SIOS DataKeeper also supports clusters that span Availability Zones or Regions, this guide assumes each node resides in the same Azure Region, but different Fault Domains. SIOS DataKeeper will be used in place of the shared storage normally required to create a SQL Server 2008 R2 FCI.
PRE-REQUISITES
Active Directory
This guide assumes you have an existing Active Directory Domain. You can manage your own Domain Controllers or use Azure Active Directory Domain Services. For this tutorial we will connect to a domain called contoso.local. Of course you will connect to your own domain when following this tutorial.
Open Firewall Ports
– SQL Server:1433 for Default Instance
– Load Balancer Health Probe: 59999
– DataKeeper: these firewall rules are added to the Windows host based firewall automatically during installation. For details on which ports are opened consult the SIOS documentation.
– Keep in mind, if you have any network based security in place that blocks ports between the cluster nodes you will need to account for these ports there as well.
DataKeeper Service Account
Create a Domain account. We will specify this account when we install DataKeeper. This account will need to be added to the Local Administrators group on each node of the cluster.
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