SQL SERVER – Availability Group Seen in SSMS but missing in Cluster Manager. What’s Wrong?

One of my existing clients has sent me an interesting question. In this blog, I would share one interesting situation where my client has created an availability group and it was visible in SSMS, but no role was visible in failover cluster manager.

Here is the picture which you explain what we were seeing.

Generally, when an availability group is created, an AG resource is created in a Windows cluster.

WORKAROUND/SOLUTION

The question which was asked by my client was perfectly valid. It is possible to run into the situation if we do below steps.

1. Enable feature of AlwaysOn availability group without creating windows cluster.
   
2. Create Availability Group and choose NONE as cluster type as there is no option called “NONE” as cluster type in below screen.
   
3. Now, enabled windows clustering feature and create windows cluster.

At this point, you can open cluster manager and would see no availability group role because availability group was created as Cluster Type None.

So, if you ever see such situation, check the Dashboard of Always On availability group and have a look at cluster type which is highlighted as below.

This feature is called as a Read Scale and you can read more about this at below link Use read-scale with Always On availability groups

Hope you found this information useful. Please comment and let me know.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)

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