For a recent project that required HA/DR but couldn’t justify Enterprise edition we decided to take the plunge on 2016’s Basic Availability Groups.
For a quick rundown of the watered down feature set – basically what you don’t get with a Basic Availability Group (BAG) – the major points are as follows:
-
You can only have 2 nodes.
-
Only one database can be in the group.
-
You can not have the secondary be in read only.
-
You can not take backups from the secondary.
The answer is “yes” but it’s not easy. Read on for more.