SAA-C03 Q151 · Migration

Question

An ecommerce company is planning to migrate an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to the AWS Cloud. The company needs to migrate the database to SQL Server Always On availability groups. The cloud- based solution must be highly available. What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

**Answer C** satisfies every requirement:

1. **SQL Server Always On Availability Groups**: This feature is NOT available on Amazon RDS — it requires self-managed SQL Server on EC2 instances. Always On AGs require Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), which needs shared storage for the cluster witness/quorum.

2. **Three EC2 instances across three AZs**: Deploying across three Availability Zones provides high availability. A three-node cluster allows the quorum to survive a single AZ failure (majority voting: 2 out of 3 nodes remain).

3. **Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as storage**: This is the critical differentiator. FSx for Windows File Server provides:
   - **SMB protocol support** required by Windows-based SQL Server clustering
   - **Shared file storage** that multiple EC2

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