55246-A: SQL 2016 AlwaysOn High Availability — Lesson 3: Failover, Backup, Maintenance and Disaster Recovery

Learning Objectives

• Perform planned and unplanned failover, backup, restore, patching, maintenance, and disaster-recovery procedures
• Test data protection, quorum behavior, site loss, split-brain safeguards, rollback, and business continuity
• Validate failover, backup, maintenance and disaster recovery decisions with documented requirements, evidence, risk controls, and measurable acceptance criteria

Detailed Topics

• Perform planned and unplanned failover: Perform planned and unplanned failover, backup, restore, patching, maintenance, and disaster-recovery procedures
• Test data protection: Test data protection, quorum behavior, site loss, split-brain safeguards, rollback, and business continuity
• Validate failover: Validate failover, backup, maintenance and disaster recovery decisions with documented requirements, evidence, risk controls, and measurable acceptance criteria

Guided Demonstration

1. Review the requirement, users, data, dependencies, permissions, risks, and expected result.
2. Demonstrate the relevant configuration, development, analysis, administration, testing, or operational workflow step by step.
3. Capture settings, outputs, logs, screenshots, calculations, test results, and other useful evidence.
4. Compare the observed result with acceptance criteria and explain any corrective action.

Hands-On Activity

Analyze a realistic business case, compare implementation options, and validate the selected approach.

• Document assumptions, prerequisites, and the planned sequence before starting.
• Complete the activity and preserve evidence of normal, boundary, and failure behavior.
• Record issues, corrective actions, reusable notes, and the next improvement priority.

Scenario Analysis

• Identify the business or technical decision that must be made.
• Compare valid implementation approaches and their trade-offs.
• Consider security, privacy, accessibility, performance, support, and operational impact.

Troubleshooting Focus

• Separate symptoms from causes and collect evidence before applying a fix.
• Check configuration, data, permissions, dependencies, capacity, connectivity, and recent changes.
• Validate rollback, recovery, ownership, user impact, and business continuity.

Validation Checklist

• The requirement, scope, inputs, and expected outcome are clear.
• The selected design or configuration is documented and follows approved standards.
• Normal, boundary, failure, security, accessibility, and operational conditions are reviewed.
• The result is supported by evidence and the next improvement is prioritized.

Lesson Outcome

Learners can explain and apply Failover, Backup, Maintenance and Disaster Recovery in a realistic scenario and validate the result with documented evidence.