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Now with regard to SQL Server clustering and SQL Server load

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balancing, the SQL Server product itself has a feature called

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the Always On availability group.

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Now, you can run SQL Server databases in a traditional cluster, FCI, or

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failover cluster infrastructure, using an SOFS, Scale‑Out File Server,

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share just like I mentioned a few minutes ago.

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Always On availability groups are similar in principle to the Storage Spaces

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Direct and as much as administrators can leverage the database servers own

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local storage instead of having for you to shell out for a storage area

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network using iSCSI or Fibre Channel like we discussed earlier in the course.

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It's an easier way to provide high availability. So what you wind up with in

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your failover clusters,

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you've got your SQL Server nodes that are running the SQL Server

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database engine, but they're hosting those databases locally, as you can

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see. And when you configure an Always On availability group, you do that

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within the SQL Server control plane,

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you wind up with a one primary and one or more secondary instances, and those

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databases are all internally synchronized with each other.

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You see the benefit here? So you're avoiding that dependency on

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external shared storage, and you can failover from primary to

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secondary, and it's called an availability group because you can

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failover multiple databases together.

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Now, the availability group feature uses a listener IP

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address to address that virtual cluster in a similar way

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to how in failover clustering, you create a client access point.

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Again, Tim,

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why are you mentioning this? Especially, you might know that Microsoft has a separate SQL Server database administrator certification.