Add Replica Wizard

This process should be called from the pri­ma­ry repli­ca serv­er but con­nect­ed to the lis­ten­er for the Avail­abil­i­ty Group.

To begin the process, con­nect to the AlwaysOn Avail­abil­i­ty Group Lis­ten­er and right-click the "AlwaysOn High Availability->Availability Groups->(name of your group)->"Availability Repli­cas" fold­er, then choose "Add Replica".

Press "Next".

Connect to Existing Replica

Before you add a new repli­ca, you need to con­nect to an exist­ing repli­ca. The wiz­ard will dis­play the name of the repli­ca that is host­ed, but you will need to press the "Con­nect" but­ton to con­nect to it.

When you press the "Con­nect" but­ton, you will be pre­sent­ed the same con­nec­tion win­dow that you would be giv­en when ini­tial­ly con­nect­ing to the server.

Once you have con­nect­ed direct­ly to the serv­er where the repli­ca is host­ed, this win­dow will be updated.

Press "Next" to continue.

Add Replica

Once you get to this screen, Press the "Add Repli­ca" to add the new serv­er to the cluster.

You will be pre­sent­ed a serv­er con­nec­tion win­dow — select the serv­er name and instance of the SQL Serv­er that will join the AlwaysOn Avail­abil­i­ty Group and press "Con­nect".

The Authen­ti­ca­tion method you use here doesn't need to be the one that is going to be used per­ma­nent­ly for this con­nec­tion — it needs to be good enough to estab­lish the connection.

Set "Replicas" Parameters

In our lab, we chose the read­able repli­ca to have asyn­chro­nous updates (this will increase per­for­mance of the entire clus­ter) and set the "Read­able Sec­ondary" prop­er­ty to "Read-intent Only". This means that if an appli­ca­tion wants to use this copy, it needs to spec­i­fy "read intent only" in its con­nect string.

NOTE: Not any appli­ca­tion will be able to use this copy out of the box — some­one with at least enough knowl­edge to change the con­nect string will need to make the delib­er­ate deci­sion to use it.

Set "EndPoints" Parameters

Typ­i­cal­ly, these para­me­ters do not need to be changed.

Set "Backup Preferences" Parameters

Since these were already set up when the clus­ter was orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed, these should not need to be changed when adding a read­able replica.

Set "Listener" Option

Since the Avail­abil­i­ty Group should already have a lis­ten­er set up, choose the first option.

Select Initial Data Synchronization

The sim­plest way to accom­plish this is to des­ig­nate a direc­to­ry that is acces­si­ble from both the pri­ma­ry serv­er and the repli­ca data­base server.

Even if you need to cre­ate a tem­po­rary direc­to­ry and open per­mis­sions on it so that both servers can read and write to it, this method is far sim­pler than the oth­er two methods.

Once the read­able repli­ca is up and run­ning, you will not need this direc­to­ry any more, so it can be removed after the repli­ca is up and run­ning — it is only used to trans­fer the con­tents of the data­base and syn­chro­nize copies.

When fin­ished, press "Next".

Summary

Before cre­at­ing the repli­ca, the wiz­ard will show you what you will be doing and give you a chance to go back and make changes. If you are sat­is­fied with your choic­es, press "Fin­ish" to cre­ate the replica.

Results

When fin­ished, the wiz­ard will dis­play your results.