I support a multi-instance, two node failover cluster (active-active). Both instances are running SQL 2014, on Windows Server 2008R2. The nodes each have 3/4 TB of memory and 32 cores (64 with HT). SQL is configured with a Max memory of 350GB for each instance. There are between 60 and 100 databases per instance with 3-5 TB of datafiles in per instance.

I’m having some issues with failover times that I’m trying to resolve. The issue appears to be centered around shutting down the SQL instance prior to the failover. When a manual failover is performed, we do the following to speed things up to this point.

  1. Checkpoint all databases just prior to failover to get as many dirty pages written to disk prior to the beginning of the failover as possible. Failovers were much longer prior to adding this step

  2. Manual failover is initiated, SQL goes into SA only mode for 1-2 minutes and then the SQL instance stops.

  3. It takes another 1-2 minutes to release the memory back to the OS before the failover occurs and the resource comes up on the other node.

If the SQL instance has only limited data in memory the failover happens much more quickly.

We looked at I/O and CPU metrics and don’t see any significant issues.

I’m looking for resources and ideas to help reduce the time it takes for this failover to happen. Thanks, -Luke.



You are correct, because that's exactly what is happening. You're shutting it down nicely on one node, moving resources, and starting it up on another node. The question actually doesn't have anything to do with clustering but with speeding up a clean SQL Server shutdown.


When SQL Server cleanly shuts down, it flushes all of the buffers and asks internal systems to shut themselves down.

So, how do you make this faster? First, this is only really the case when you are cleanly shutting down - which most likely won't happen during a real failure. Secondly, you don't let SQL Server shut down - I would look into using Availability Groups and testing your manual failover times to compare and contrast the differences.

Additionally, no matter what you use, indirect checkpoints are much more effective than traditional.

  • Yes, It's definitely an issue with shutdown, we were planning to go to indirect checkpoints when we upgrade to 2016, however the OLTP performance warning on MSDN was somewhat of a concern. Putting about 150 databases in AG's seemed like a bit of a maintenance headache but it's something we are looking into. – Luke L Mar 7 '17 at 14:11
  • FCI's make the fail over aspect complete. The place this comes into play most directly is during our monthly patching cycle. We will need to shut down SQL Server at some point to patch. – Luke L Mar 7 '17 at 14:18

The issue we faced here became much larger as we migrated to larger hardware with 3TB of memory, the fail over times were over 10 minutes.

We solved the issue with a two-fold approach.

1) Indirect checkpoints which helped the SQL Server shutdown more quickly.

2) Enabling Lock Pages in Memory for the SQL Engine accounts. This allows SQL to handle memory allocation much better and to both free up and take memory faster.

The fail overs went from 10+ minutes per instance to around 30 seconds.

  • +1 for the lock pages in memory and for posting your findings – Marcello Miorelli Jun 10 '19 at 13:11

Checking the VLF count of the databases helps too. I faced the same issues and the reason was high VLF count >15K. After reducing the vlf count ,it went noticeably fast.

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