Mike Good (7/1/2015)
Interesting and well written, but I disagree with your slant.
Thanks for the feedback
Mike Good (7/1/2015)
Much of this article is based on assumption that your DR instance is providing HA. In my experience, with a moderately busy environment this is not possible...you will not be able to tolerate a synchronous AG secondary across WAN. In such an environment, your 2-node async AG-only solution then has DR but no HA.
This does depend on the organisations ability to maintain a stable site link, again it's cost associated.
I wouldn't say its totally based on DR providing HA but does sort of single it out a bit
Mike Good (7/1/2015)
In such an environment, you can readily achieve HA with either an FCI solution or by adding another local synchronous AG replica. The complexity is about the same either way.
I wouldn't agree here, but then that's just my opinion
Mike Good (7/1/2015)
The drive letter problem is pretty simple to work around without removing nodes from the cluster. One way is to simply configure the shared disk drive letters in advance of installing the SQL FCI. Not a big deal.
Actually never tried that way round but I would expect that to fail too
Mike Good (7/1/2015)
This is not tolerable for my production setup, and I imagine that is fairly typical?
Is it though?
I have worked in many organisations who have dedicated cross site links to achieve all this and more.
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉