Using SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups

SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups is a high availability and disaster recovery solution that provides an enterprise-level alternative to database mirroring in SQL Server 2012 environments.

An AlwaysOn Availability Group supports a failover environment for a discrete set of user databases, known as availability databases, that fail over together. The availability group supports a set of read-write primary databases and one to four sets of corresponding secondary databases.

To set up an AlwaysOn Availability Group for VMP:

  1. In each secondary database in the availability group, create the login names wicauth and wicapplication. These are the accounts that are created when the VMP Server is first installed.
    The password for each of these accounts must be identical to the passwords specified during VMP installation. If the passwords are changed on the primary SQL server, they must also be changed on the secondary databases.
  2. Link the wicauth and wicapplication accounts on each secondary database to the equivalent accounts in the WICMASTER database on the primary SQL server.
  3. Enable CLR (Common Language Runtime) for each secondary instance of SQL.
  4. Create an Assembly for each SQL instance. The VMP Web Console uses this Assembly for contact searches.

If CLR is not enabled and the Assembly is not created, the VMP Web Console displays the following error message when a secondary database becomes the primary:

Note: Contact Vocera technical support to obtain SQL scripts that will create the wicauth and wicapplication accounts, enable CLR, and create an Assembly for each secondary SQL instance.