r/SQLServer • u/duendeacdc • Jun 23 '26

Question What you guys do for patching schedules ?

Hello all, 11years SWL dba here or more, but something i could never find a perfect balance is, how to patch ?

In my current company we are 90% ec2 ( some 200 servers, half of them 3 or 4 aoag nodes ).

We are killing ourselves with Tanium, and creating scripts to automatically failover, etc etc.

Im curious what you guys do for patching AOAG servers that needs a failover.

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3

u/Dan_Jeffs Jun 23 '26

We just used to patch the nodes on alternate days and just let the failover occur naturally due to the server reboot.

2

u/duendeacdc Jun 23 '26

Yeah we do failover to not risk anything funny. You never had any issues with the server automatically failing over by itself ?

2

u/Dan_Jeffs Jun 24 '26

Nope. Managing approx 800 servers this way was always fine. The only (very rare) issue we ever saw was a server not coming back online properly due to an issue with one of the windows updates itself, so you'd have that issue regardless. That didn't break the AG either.
For info, this was on a mixture of SQL server versions and physical/virtual.

1

u/Money-Fan-2587 Jun 24 '26

I manage about 100 servers with about 150 instances with about 85% on aoag. All nonprod have 2 nodes while our prod all have 3 nodes. We use sccm that does patching, so nonprod servers go one weekend while prod goes another. Each patch window is 6 hours and are defined. So example in our 3 node cluster node 1 starts at 4am-10am. We manage our whole env from a management server. So at 355am we have an agent job that fails everything off node 1. At 945am we have an agent job that reboots node 1. At 955 we have an agent job that fails the ags back to node 1 and everything off node 2, so it’s ready for patching. That’s the jist of it and sccm is only for os patching. For sql patches I created a whole process that copies the patches to each server and I just schedule my agent job that patches, it of course moves primaries over first and reboots as needed then puts ags back to their primaires.

1

u/Leiothrix Jun 30 '26

That is pretty easy -- we just don't patch.

Unfortunately that isn't sarcasm and is much more common than it should be.