We are currently implementing a new software package which has one part of its system using database replication (but doesn't support AlwaysOn Availability Groups) replicate from another database that does support AOAG's.
Currently, they only support replication setup via their installer, which creates the entire config on both the publisher and subscriber servers in one go.
It is using transactional replication, and there are both pull and push subscriptions.
The installer creates the distributor on the publisher, which I assume will break replication after a failover and require generation of new snapshots and reinitializion of subscriptions.
Assuming we are doing a planned failover (say for O/S patching), looking to pause replication until we can failover back to the node with the distributor.
Am I on the right track in saying the most reliable method of "pausing" replication would be to use sp_MSstopdistribution_agent on the publisher (for PUSH) and on subscriber (for PULL) before failover to the (non-distributor) node, then do a sp_MSstartdistribution_agent after we fail back again?
We are using SQL 2014 on both publisher and subscriber.