Sql-server – Log Shipping from Synchronous Automatic Failover AlwaysOn Availability Group AAG

If you want to enable automatic failover, you will need to ensure that you have an "automatic failover set", to include two replicas (in your case, that'd be your two nodes) both set with synchronous commit, as well as automatic failover.

When you setup the Availability Group, this can be accomplished through the GUI, but if you had this scripted out, it would appear in the CREATE AVAILABILITY GROUP command. If you take a look at the syntax and possible parameters of CREATE AVAILABILITY GROUP, you would simply see the opportunity to set AVAILABILITY_MODE = SYNCHRONOUS_COMMIT as well as set FAILOVER_MODE = AUTOMATIC. This is essentially the steps to setup automatic failover.

Likewise, if this is already setup you can modify these replica settings with ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP ... MODIFY REPLICA ON ... and specify the same above parameters.

Before continuing on, though, with the above modifications it is definitely going to be worth verifying what you already have in place. A quick query that will tell you what your commit mode and failover mode is for your current configuration is below:

select
    ar.replica_server_name,
    availability_group_name = ag.name,
    ar.availability_mode_desc,
    ar.failover_mode_desc
from sys.availability_replicas ar
inner join sys.availability_groups ag
on ar.group_id = ag.group_id
order by availability_group_name, replica_server_name;

Feel free to edit your question and put the output of the above query for review.

EDIT: In order to address your comment, it is worth pointing out that to have automatic failover you must be utilizing synchronous commit.

After a forced failover testing with async mode, do I need to rebuild my old primary database?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "rebuild" the database, but provided the databases are still in a working condition then you shouldn't need to take any actions like that.

What you're seeing, by performing a forced failover, is by design. If you do a forced failover, you could potentially have failed over to a replica that isn't completely caught up or at the same point-in-time as the primary replica. Because of that, data movement is suspended to the secondary replica(s) from the now primary replica so there is a way to have manual intervention if you are now on a database that is "behind". That behavior that you are seeing is a good thing.

This BOL reference explains it all:

After a forced failover, all secondary databases are suspended. This includes the former primary databases, after the former primary replica comes back online and discovers that it is now a secondary replica. You must manually resume each suspended database individually on each secondary replica.

When a secondary database is resumed, it initiates data synchronization with the corresponding primary database. The secondary database rolls back any log records that were never committed on the new primary database. Therefore, if you are concerned about possible data loss on the post-failover primary databases, you should attempt to create a database snapshot on the suspended databases on one of the synchronous-commit secondary databases.

Please see this BOL reference on how to resume an AG database.

The T-SQL for this would be:

alter database YourDatabaseName
set hadr resume;

NOTE/WARNING/DISCLAIMER: You really need to do some leg work to ensure that you are not causing data loss by resuming data movement. See above, it could be a huge problem. The point of suspending data movement is for this very reason: To manually make sure you can recover as much data as possible. When you resume data movement, that could be irreversible. When you resume data movement after a forced failover, you have to have the words "potential data loss" in the forefront of your mind always.