>> Come join and learn the top reasons why you should
rehost your SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines,
this week on Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman,
and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today, I'm joined once again by Amit,
who's a Group Program Manager on the Azure Data team.
Thanks for joining us today again, Amit.
>> Hey, thanks, Anna. Glad to be back on the show,
and it's great to be talking about SQL Server VMs again.
>> Yeah. Today, we're actually going to be talking
about some of the top reasons you should
rehost your SQL Server on an Azure Virtual Machine.
I'm really interested to learn more
about some of the reasons you have for us to move.
What are the reasons that I should
rehost to SQL Server on an Azure VM?
>> Hey, that's a very common question that customers ask us.
What's the benefit of hosting
SQL Server virtual machines in Azure?
I'll answer that in two parts.
One, I'm going to switch over to my slide deck.
The first one is essentially the hybrid benefit of the offer.
In this example, you see we actually
offer a grace period of six months where
you can host your
SQL Server licenses both On-premises and in Azure.
What that allows you to do, is it
allows you to plan for the migration,
actually, execute the migration without
having to rebuy your licenses for Azure.
After those six months are over,
when you're actually running an Azure,
we offer a bunch of benefits.
In the previous video that we did together,
I talked about how SQL Server Software Assurance benefits
helps reduce the cost
of running SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines.
In addition to that,
we also offer a host of other benefits that are enabled through
the SQL Server Infrastructure as a Service or the IaaS extension.
Once you enable that on
any virtual machine that's running SQL Server,
you get ability to easily configure your high availability.
You actually have the ability to configure
your SQL Server VM for
best practices associated with storage configuration.
You get security updates for free if you were
running SQL Server 2008 R2.
You also have the ability of configuring and running
your SQL Server environment a lot better
than writing custom automation.
Let's switch over to my Azure portal,
and let me show you what those features are.
I'm going to quickly switch over to my Azure portal.
What you see on your screen right now is actually
the SQL Server virtual machine view of
a SQL Server 2019 Developer edition
deployed on a Windows Server 2019 server.
In this case, I have actually
configured the IaaS extension to save time.
If you look at my configuration option,
the first thing you will see is the ability
for me to actually configure MySQL Server license.
Right now, I'm basically paying
by the R. I'm not incurring a license costs.
If I had to incur license cost,
I switch over to enterprise or standard edition.
I could switch onto Azure Hybrid Benefit if I have
enough SQL Server licenses covered by
software assurance that I'm not using on-premises.
I even have the ability,
if I'm a software assurance customer or a subscription customer,
I can leverage the disaster recovery tab.
I should not pay for the disaster recovery VM.
I can easily configure and extend my drive.
The bottom half that you see here,
it allows me to extend my drive.
It allows me to configure MySQL Server data, log, and tempdb.
At the same time, I go over to the Security tab.
It allows me to configure MySQL Server connectivity.
For it to be inside the VM,
allow it to access publicly over the Internet
or just within the virtual network.
I can set the port.
In this case, it's using the default port.
If you're running a production VM,
you'd want to change this to a non-default port.
You can enable mixed-mode authentication directly from the portal,
and you can also enable Azure Key Vault integration.
This allows you to leverage Key Vault for things like
storage encryption address for transparent database encryption,
or you can use Azure Key Vault keys to
encrypt your columns and
other sensitive data stored inside the SQL Server database.
In terms of patching,
a lot of our enterprise customers have
very sophisticated patching mechanisms that they already deployed.
But if you have dev edition VMs that you want to just set
up a quick way of patching them with the latest security updates.
You can configure a maintenance schedule.
You can pick what time it
starts and for what duration it has to run.
In addition to that,
the same dev VMs,
you might want to back them up.
You can enable automatic backup,
set a retention period,
select a storage account,
select encryption for the backups,
enable system database backups if you want to restore them,
and also set up a schedule if you don't want it to be
automatic and managed by
the automated backup feature of SQL Server.
In addition to that, there are a few other features.
For example, if you're using machine learning,
in my case, I have R services enabled.
You have the ability to enable it directly and
configure it in the portal
without you having to go through all the steps.
The new feature, which is in preview that I'm super excited about,
is the ability for you to configure
an availability group or a failover cluster.
Once you kick off this wizard,
in this case, it's a single-node VM, which is not active.
But if you have a cluster,
you have the ability to walk through a wizard which
walks you through all the steps of setting up the replicas,
configuring the listener, and making sure that it's set
up correctly as per SQL Server best practices in Azure.
This actually helps you,
and not just set it up and monitor it.
If you're creating a new SQL Server VM,
you have the ability to doing
all these tasks upfront and making your life a lot easier.
You could go to the Configuration tab,
the reason why you see
the storage configuration here is because I picked
the SQL Server IaaS extension when I was setting up this VM.
If I look at the overview,
you will see all the other capabilities
show up nicely in different tiles,
and you can click on each one of them and configure them.
At the same time,
you can access all of this from
the command line or PowerShell as well.
If you have wide-scale automation that you want to drive,
you can do that from the command line or
any other form of automation that you
use to run SQL Server virtual machines in Azure.
>> Thanks, Amit. This is really cool.
Two things that really stood out to me.
One, I wasn't aware of the Azure Hybrid Benefit,
that you could get that six month of overlap time
as you migrate to the Cloud. That's pretty cool.
Two, this ability to easily create
availability groups and failover cluster instances. That's huge.
Setting those things up can be a little complicated.
Thanks for sharing with us.
If our users want to get started,
where do you recommend they start?
>> I would recommend them to go to aka.ms/azuresqlvm.
That would be a great starting point to look at what features I
just demoed on the web.
At the same time it will also give you an idea of
what's upcoming and anything
new that we announce for SQL VMs in Azure.
>> Awesome. Well, thanks again,
Amit, for being on the show.
I think we're going to shoot one more episode,
so be sure to stay tuned and we
hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
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