AlwaysOn Availability Groups for SharePoint 2013...unless you like workflows (and who doesn’t?)
When planning for disaster recovery or high availability in a SharePoint farm, most people start thinking of SQL Server AlwaysOn High Availability Groups or SQL Mirroring. With SQL Server 2012, the guidance from Microsoft was to avoid using mirroring because it is being deprecated in future releases of SQL. “Avoid using this feature in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use this feature. Use AlwaysOn Availability Groups instead.”
So dive right in and set up an AlwaysOn availability group for your new SharePoint 2013 on-premise farm, right? If you have workflow manager 1.0 and service bus (which you do if you want to use SharePoint 2013 workflows and not just built-in SharePoint 2010 workflows) then stop right there!
If you check out the Workflow Manager documentation from Microsoft, it states that “since all of the data of Workflow Manager is stored in the above-mentioned SQL Server databases, any SQL Server based high availability and backup strategy should apply for Workflow Manager as well.”
Apparently this is poor guidance, or as Microsoft calls it, a ‘documentation bug’. Wish I could call my mistakes ‘bugs’ and get away with it!
It has been confirmed with the Workflow Manager product team that SQL AlwaysOn was not explicitly tested with Workflow Manager and therefore they do not support such a configuration. They have only validated the techniques stated explicitly in the aforementioned documentation.
So what are your options?
1. SQL Mirroring
2. SQL Replication
3. Simple backups as well as a combination of backups and log shipping.
So...if you have Service Bus or Workflow databases in a SQL AlwaysOn configuration...start making plans to remove them from the group and back them up using an alternative method.
