SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups require a database mirroring endpoint for each SQL Server instance that will be hosting an availability group replica and/or database mirroring session. This SQL Server instance endpoint is then shared by one or more availability group replicas and/or database mirroring sessions and is the mechanism for communication between the primary replica and the associated secondary replicas.
Depending on the data modification workloads on the primary replica, the availability group messaging throughput requirements can be non-trivial. This activity is also sensitive to traffic from concurrent non-availability group activity. If throughput is suffering due to degraded bandwidth and concurrent traffic, you may consider isolating the availability group traffic to its own dedicated network adapter for each SQL Server instance hosting an availability replica. This post will describe this process and also briefly describe what you might expect to see in a degraded throughput scenario.
