I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately talking to people about the benefits of using SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups in your CRM infrastructure.  I just came across a great video that’s a great primer on AlwaysOn Availability Groups:

https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/SQL-2012-AlwaysOn-Availability-Groups/player?w=512&h=288

Here is a link to the SQL documentation as well:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh510230

AlwaysOn is already used in CRM Online for both local failover/redundancy and geographically distributed failover/redundancy for disaster recovery.  As of Update Rollup 12 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the implementation guide has been updated with AlwayOn guidance:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj822357.aspx

One of the nice features of AlwaysOn is Active Secondaries: Readable Secondary Replicas (AlwaysOn Availability Groups).   You can configure custom reports to use the readable replica.  Here’s a good blog post on the topic:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thecrmguys/archive/2012/08/10/crm-reporting-and-sql-2012-alwayson-availability-groups-better-together.aspx

Make sure you read the limitations of this approach stated in the blog post.  You should evaluate the feasibility of using this approach to determine whether the benefits are applicable to you. 

@devkeydet