Your company has offices in Seattle and Montreal. The network contains two servers named Server1 and Server2 that have SQL Server 2012 installed. Server1 is located in the Seattle office. Server2 is l

Synchronous-commit mode would severely degrade primary replica performance due to the requirement that transactions are committed on both the primary and secondary before the primary acknowledges the commit to the client, which is impractical over a 200 ms latency link.

Synchronous-commit mode is unsuitable for high-latency links as it significantly impacts performance, and while automatic failover typically requires synchronous-commit, the high latency would lead to poor performance and potential issues with reliable failover detection.

While asynchronous-commit mode is appropriate for high latency, automatic failover with asynchronous-commit is generally not recommended because it accepts potential data loss and high network latency can lead to unreliable health monitoring, potentially causing spurious failovers or split-brain scenarios.

Asynchronous-commit mode is essential for high-latency WAN links because the primary replica commits transactions without waiting for the secondary replica, preventing performance degradation on the primary. Manual failover, combined with asynchronous-commit, allows administrators to control the failover process, accepting the inherent potential for data loss in exchange for cross-site availability and better performance under such network conditions.