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>> Hi, my name is Amit Banerjee.
I'm a Group Program Manager with the SQL Server product group.
I'm responsible for the database engine
that runs inside SQL Server.
In this episode, we're going to talk about how to actually take
the high availability and disaster recovery
benefits that we introduced in
November 2019 and apply them to
your SQL Server architectures running inside of Azure.
So if you remember from our previous episodes,
we said that you actually get
a DR replica for free if you're running an Azure VM.
I'm just going to highlight that over here.
You also get a HA replica if
you're running on an Azure virtual machine.
In this episode, we're just going to restrict
the architectures to SQL Server
running in an Azure virtual machine.
So let's take a scenario where you have
a primary virtual machine running SQL.
Let's say this has 32 vCores.
Then you have another secondary,
which is, let's say the HA replica,
and that also has 32 vCores.
Now in this scenario,
you're actually taking advantage of, let's say,
a feature like Always On
availability groups to create the sync HA replica for you.
With the benefit that you already had,
you would not need to license for
your SQL Server high availability replica
if you have Software Assurance.
So all of these benefits actually require you
to have Software Assurance.
With Software Assurance, you actually get these two benefits.
If you're running an Azure VM,
you essentially are already using
Azure as your disaster recovery site.
If you choose to add,
let's say, another secondary replica.
So the data replication happens in this manner from the primary.
In this scenario, let's say you have another 32 vCores
starting with 2019 and starting from November 1st,
you would not need to pay for these virtual cores as well.
So your architecture now would look like,
let's say you're in US East two data center
and you're going to US West two Azure DR site.
So let's say in this environment,
you have a primary virtual machine,
and you have a secondary virtual machine,
and you have another secondary virtual machine here.
Let's say you are deploying
a secondary HA replica in
the primary site and you're deploying a DR replica in US West two.
Each of these, in my previous example,
I said 32, each of them are 32.
The licenses that you would need to pay for
is 32 for 32 virtual cores.
On the primary, the HA would be zero
and the DR would be zero if you have Software Assurance.
These are passive replicas,
so on the secondary replicas,
you can run backups,
you can do maintenance operations like check DBs.
You can actually also let
monitoring applications connect to
them and you can actually run DR drills in them as well.
So if you need to break
this environment and run a DR drill on this environment,
you could do so for fixed periods of time
and you would not incur additional licensing costs for them.
The last scenario that this helps you get
better TCO in the Cloud is if
you actually use this for any feature.
For example, if you were using log shipping or if
you actually even used, in our example,
the use of Always On availability groups or if you set up
a simple backup and restore onto a secondary site,
which is the US West two in my example,
you would still be able to leverage
the benefit because this would serve as the DR site.
So as you can see here,
by combining SQL Server features that SQL Server ships for
high availability and disaster recovery
and by leveraging Software Assurance benefits,
you're able to drive
a very optimal architecture inside of Azure without
having to pay for additional licenses
and still keep your data highly available and safe.
Thank you very much for joining this session and look forward
to driving more and more optimal architectures in Azure. Thanks.