I am looking at implementing AlwaysOn Availability Groups for my production environment. I have 2 servers. My goal is to have 1 as the live database and the other available in case the primary goes down.
I'm trying to figure out if both servers need access to the same data files or if each server will have it's own copy of the database files/logs?
I've never used any of the sql server failover technologies in the past.
Thanks,
Sounds like you want server replication. Essentially each server will run their own db server daemon and keep their own files. As far as I understand there are two main configurations you can use: master-master, and master-slave. In master-master the two servers form a cluster and for a transaction to complete it must be written to both servers so if one crashes that transaction is still available to the world. The other is more meant as a backup system that doesn't balance load. When possible the new data is sent to the slave. I'm not sure what guarantees they have in place for the data making it to the backup before a transaction completes. Hope this is a useful start.