We have a virtualized environment for SQL 2012 , where the Availability Group replicas are being hosted on VM Nodes as follows :
- Primay Replica - VM Node1
- Secondary Replica - VM Node2
Node1 & Node2 are on Windows Cluster with File share as Quorom, which of course is a pre-requisite for AG.
Scenario is : Node1 gets corrupted\crashed completely , leading to failover of all the databases to Node2 . Now we want to bring the Node1 back online , for which we have two options :
1. Recover the VM Node1 from VM backup ( if possible ) to the point where it last got down due to crash\corruption, so that it itself joins the Windows cluster and brings the databases in sync between Node1 & Node2.
2. Complete rebuild the Node1 VM from scratch and join to the Windows cluster for AG.
My question is which of the above two approaches is better\feasible to bring the AG databases back in synchronization faster once the Node1 is up ?
Is it like with approach 1 , as soon as the Node1 is recovered, AG will sync the DBs automatically or will it require manual effort to setup the AG databases again.
Thanks in advance for the inputs !