Hi. Been a while since I maintained an Always On cluster. I now have a typical Always On AG cluster setup (as a test cluster): Node1 = HA, Node2 = HA, Node3 = DR. Node1 has multiple databases and was originally the primary. The databases on Node1 are my active databases with none assigned as availability databases. But currently Node2 is the primary. However, there are no databases at all created on the Node2 instance, and thus no availability databases in the replica to sync. I want to get back to a state where Node1 is primary. You might be asking, how did the cluster get in a state where I have a primary (Node2) with no databases on it. Not sure, but I think it happened when Ops team applied Windows updates, and didn't do the rolling updates in proper sequence. Anyway, Node2 now displays a critical error:
"The availability group is not ready for automatic failover. The primary replica and a secondary replica are configured for automatic failover, however, the secondary replica is not ready for an automatic failover. Possibly the secondary replica is unavailable, or its data synchronization state is currently not in the SYNCHRONIZED synchronization state."
I think the error message is probably because the HA nodes are in synchronous commit mode, but there are no availability databases to sync from Node2 to Node1. (as I said, the DBs are on Node1.) So how do I get the sync back in order with Node1 as the primary? I think I have to back up the DBs on Node1, restore to Node2, add as availability databases on Node2. Then what's the next steps? Thanks.