A common question that I get asked a lot is whether Microsoft officially supports a specific configuration … or not…

– Can I add the secondary replica in an Always On Availability Group as a publisher in a transactional replication topology?

– Is running a guest Windows cluster on VMWare supported by both VMWare and Microsoft?

– Can I have named SQL Server instances as replicas in an Always On Availability Group?

– Can I use a dedicated network adapter for a Distributed Availability Group data replication traffic?

– Can I have more than 100+ databases in an Always On Availability Group?

People on newsgroups, forums, and online communities are asking the same questions. And everyone who responds to these questions almost always provides a technical answer.

Maybe you’re like one of them. Your boss wants to implement a specific configuration and you wonder if it is supported or not. And you do your due diligence and research online to validate your idea – reading official vendor documentation, blog posts, articles, etc.

The problem with asking the question “Is this supported?” is that it often leads you to a different path, one that may not be beneficial to your organization – or your sanity. Instead of helping you achieve your goals, it may end up causing more issues. And more issues can further lead to more incidents, more tickets, more unnecessary work, more frustration, more outages, more anxiety, and so on.

In this episode of the Practical SQL Server HA/DR Show, I talk about about why asking the question “Is This Supported?” is the wrong question to ask about your SQL Server Always On Availability Groups. I also share the alternative – the right questions (I did say questions, meaning not just one) to ask when deploying a specific configuration.

I’ll be doing this on a weekly basis so make sure you keep an eye out for announcements on my social media profiles (LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube)