Dualcore DBA is doing some sysadmin work. First up is setting up a domain controller:
In this post, we’ll walk through the process of how I set up an Active Directory (AD) in my home lab. I know, this blog is normally database focused, so why are we looking at Active Directory? Well, yes, it isn’t strictly database related. However, where there is an enterprise SQL Server estate, there is normally Active Directory. In the next few posts, we’ll be looking at Availability Groups, which, whilst configurable without AD, generally are run in AD environments. Also, it isn’t really a great deal of work to set up in the home lab. It takes longer to install the Windows server than to actually set up AD, so it’s not really an issue to set it up to have a more realistic lab environment.
I am using Windows Server 2022 and have set up a specific VM for this purpose which is fairly modest with 2 CPU cores and 4GB of memory.
After that, try on creating a cluster without a domain setup:
This post documents the process of setting up a non-domain Windows Server Failover Cluster, officially known as a Workgroup Cluster. The process is similar to Setting Up a Windows Cluster, however there is a slight difference in this scenario which is that the nodes in the cluster are not part of an Active Directory domain. This process can be used to set up a SQL Server Availability Group where the nodes are not in an Active Directory environment.
And creating a cluster inside of a domain:
In this post, we’ll walk through setting up a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC). This is a requirement of SQL Server Availability Groups, something which we’ll be using on this blog and so I will be setting one up that can be used in the home lab I use to write my blogs. A Windows Failover Cluster is a group of independent servers that work together, continuously monitoring each other, so that if one server fails or goes offline, another can automatically take over its workload with minimal interruption to users. WSFC handles the “which node should be primary and what do we do if it isn’t” on behalf of a SQL Server Availability Group.