How can you configure an Azure internal load balancer to work as a listener for a SQL Server Always On availability group?

When configuring an Azure internal load balancer to function effectively as a listener for a SQL Server Always On availability group, enabling Floating IP is crucial. The Floating IP feature allows the load balancer to gracefully handle failover operations within the availability group. This means that when one of the SQL instances fails or goes down, the load balancer can redirect traffic to a different instance without needing to change the client connection strings or disrupt existing connections. By utilizing Floating IP, clients can seamlessly connect to the active SQL Server instance in the availability group, ensuring high availability and minimal downtime.

In scenarios involving SQL Server Always On availability groups, it's important to maintain connection stability, especially during failovers. Since Floating IP support keeps the same IP address for the listener, clients can continue to connect to the same logical address, which is essential for applications that require continuous database access.

Other configurations, such as setting session persistence or creating health probes, serve different purposes. Session persistence options like Client IP or protocol can manage how sessions are handled during a connection, but they do not provide the necessary failover capabilities that the Floating IP feature does. Similarly, although HTTP health probes are useful for monitoring availability, SQL Server typically communicates over TCP and specifically on port 1433 in this