I have some questions/situation and wanted to hear your guys thoughts. Our current set up is a 2005 dual node failover cluster and a 2008 R2 dual node failover cluster. They both have 2 physical servers each. The way the previous DBA set them up is each environment has about 5+ instances on each. The way they licensed it, all the instances have to run on one of the servers and fail over together. They did this for both clusters.
I am proposing going to 2014 and wanted to get your thoughts on a couple of things. The first being with the instance names, I don't want to have to touch our hundreds of apps and thousands of PCs to change that. What would be the best way to set up the new environment and still use the old instance names? Aliases?
Then in regards to failures, I was thinking of doing AlwaysOn availability groups and windows failover. We are going with virtuatlized servers (proposing 2 SANS, have at least one) as well as an off site server. Having 4 or 8 virtual servers and splitting up the resources for those. Would that be our best option? We haven't done anything with 2012+ on a regular basis so this is new to us.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I am looking at something similar but from 2005 to 2014 or 2016 that decision hasn't been made. I just wanted to share that I was able to glean a lot of useful information from the Brent Ozar site as it pertains to the AlwaysOn Availbility Groups. We are still in the prelim stages right now, wish I could help more.
It would be more difficult in your case, as you wanted to "untouch" any client servers (or app), I would assume that all the clients are connecting through the DB instance name rather then IP & port, otherwise it will make it more complex.
In terms of the overall design, if you wanted to use alwayson avg group, you will need to ensure that you have Enterprise edition, if licensing is a concern, then you might need to look for another solution. With SQL 2014, you can have up to 8 secondary replica, but not all of them can run in sync mode, you will need to cater about the network bandwidth between sites as well.
This is a big design topic which I believe will need more time to understand what you need, it would be hard for us to assume and go through everything in one reply, so if you still want more information, I'm happy to help you along.
I would recommend the following but not sure if it will work. lets say your current instance is named deephorizon. How are your apps connecting to the instance deephorizon?