Praise and a Suggestion for AlwaysOn
One of my favorite additions to SQL Server 2012 is the Availability Groups, referred to as AlwaysOn. These things are awesome. It's basically shared nothing clustering at a database-by-database level. You can set up a series of secondary machines that will enable you to failover a database in the event of an outage. This is a huge advantage in high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. We're talking serious business continuity. Further, you can set up one of those secondary machines to allow for reads, meaning, you get a reporting database that allows you to offload read queries from a transactional machine. Another giant win. But wait, it gets better. Now, with the capabilities that are coming with Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Virtual Networks you can go even further. It's…