As I build out my new SQL Server 2017 Availability Group in Azure, running on Windows 2016, I’m wanting to leverage some of the new technologies available. I’ve already written about using Group Managed Service Accounts and an Azure Load Balancer Witness for an Availability Group. Another one of those technologies is the new Cloud Witness feature that is available in Windows 2016.
Technically, a Cloud Witness isn’t actually part of your Availability Group (it is not configured in SQL as part of the AG), it is part of the underlying Failover Cluster that your Availability Group runs on. (You can read more on the relationship between Availability Groups and Failover Clustering here.) A Cloud Witness is a new type of Failover Cluster quorum witness that leverages Microsoft Azure as the arbitration point.
Setting up a Cloud Witness is pretty simple, I just followed the steps in Microsoft’s Deploy a Cloud Witness for a Failover Cluster tutorial. Everything went pretty smoothly, and I didn’t run into any issues.
This post is part of an ongoing series of blog posts related to my Azure SQL Server 2017 Migration.