Always On Groups How To Guides

How To Manually Failover

In SSMS right click on the availability group and left click on "failover".

Switching from Syncronous commit to asynchronous commit

In SSMS right click on the availability replica, left click on "properties" then select the availability mode
Syncronous –  will wait for secondary to harden the log before committing (unless session-timeout period exceeded where the secondary replica cannot ping the primary replica within the primarys timeout period. – if it does this then it will switch to asynchronous mode and commit on primary changing state of secondary to disconnected until connection is resumed then it will revert back to synchronous again)
A-syncronous – If primary or secondary set to asynchronous then primary will not wait for secondary to harden the log before committing on primary.

How to Set Secondary replica to Readable

Right click on the availability replica, left click on “properties” then select the readable secondary option of “Yes” or “Read-Intent only”. Click on “ok”.
Yes = always allow read on the secondary server
Read-Intent only = allow connection only if the application signals intent to read only (set in connection string).