I'm trying to learn and implement availability groups clustering in Azure. How secondary replica knows that the primary replica is down? In FCI, heartbeat links are there right? like that what we have in availability groups?
Also can anyone tell me about prerequisites to implement 4 node availability group cluster in azure portal?
Best Answer
I recently built out a 3 node Availability Group in Azure, and I took notes! :)
For the Availability Group Listener, you'll use a load balancer: http://www.sqlnuggets.com/blog/notes-sql-2017-azure-install-using-load-balancer-availability-group-listener/
And you will need to use a Cloud Witness as your Failover Cluster quorum witness: http://www.sqlnuggets.com/blog/notes-sql-2017-azure-install-using-cloud-witness-availability-group/
You can find all of my notes here: http://www.sqlnuggets.com/blog/tag/azure-migration/
In most of them, I point to the officially MS tutorials, then list problems I encountered and how I fixed them.