>> Global VNet Peering support for
Azure SQL Managed Instance is new and now available.
Learn more in this episode of Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman and
welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today, I'm joined by Srdan,
a Program Manager on the Azure Data Team.
Thanks for joining us today.
>> Hey, Anna. Thanks for having me on the show.
>> Always a pleasure.
Today, we are going to be talking about Global VNet Peering,
which isn't something we typically talk about on the show.
I wanted to start by asking you, Srdan,
we just announced Global VNet Peering for SQL Managed Instance.
Now, why is this something that is
really important and actually customers should care about?
>> Yes. Most of our enterprise customers need to set
up this business continuity disaster recovery scenario.
This scenario means that they have set
up another Managed Instance in another region.
If there are some issues in the first region, they could failover.
Now, obviously, in order to set up something like that,
you need a way to really connect these two regions.
The Global VNet Peering is the best way to do that.
>> Cool. Now, Global VNet Peering,
as far as I understand,
has been available in Azure Virtual Machines for awhile now.
Can you give us like the inside look at what challenges you
had to solve in order to unlock this for Managed Instance?
>> Sure. This is a really good question.
Actually, I prepared some diagram to help answer that.
As you can see on this diagram,
Managed Instance is a complex edit.
It contains for virtual cluster that has
a VMs that as you said have this Global VNet Peering enabled.
But it also has this load balancer thing.
Now, what we did as part of our improvement for Managed Instance,
we enabled Global VNet support for this load balancer,
so that this VM could be
accessed across the Global VNet Peering connection.
>> Got you. Does this mean that
whenever a new virtual cluster is created,
it's automatically going to have Global VNet Peering support?
Then when we deploy new Managed Instances,
are they also going to get a new cluster with this support?
Can you explain that a little bit more for me.
>> Sure. Yes, it's
a virtual cluster thing because as you can see on this diagram,
there is a virtual cluster.
This virtual cluster is once per subnet.
Basically one virtual cluster holds
all Managed Instances that you placed in that subnet.
Once the new virtual cluster is built, the Managed Instances,
it gets this load balancer and each Managed Instance that you
create in a subnet that already
contains virtual cluster is placed there.
It's true that new virtual cluster would get new load balancer.
But now, if you man
a new Managed Instance in an existing virtual cluster,
then you will not have
Managed Instance with Global Peering enabled.
>> Got it. If I could just
summarize to I make sure I've got this right;
For SQL MI to get this Global VNet Peering support,
it needs to be created in
an empty subnet or it needs to be created in
a subnet with instances that already
have Global VNet Peering support.
Is that the right way to think about it?
>> Excellent. That's the essence of it.
>> Awesome. This leads me to my next question,
which is, what does this mean for
our existing SQL MI deployments if they
want to start taking advantage of Global VNet Peering support.
>> For the users that would like
to take advantage of Global VNet Peering
support as you just previously summarized very well,
they would need to create these new virtual cluster deployments.
Actually pick up a subnet
and create this new Managed Instance there.
We also have a plan for the existing Managed Instance deployments.
But this is not trivial undertaking.
The reason is because we could not,
for the existing virtual clusters,
just upgrade this load balancer in the background.
What we need to do is actually create
new virtual cluster for those instances
and then failover the instances to the new virtual clusters.
As this thing might be obtrusive for our customers,
we would back it up
this change with some upcoming platform infrastructure change.
What customers could expect regarding
this for the existing instances,
actually the instances created just before this announcement,
that we will gradually over the next calendar year
start moving them out and they will get Global VNet Peering.
Just to repeat again,
if the customer would need this feature right now,
then they should create a new deployments
and set up peering there.
>> Okay. Got it. So there's a long-term plan
to try to move these customers to
this new type of load balancer that supports Global VNet Peering.
But the short-term plan is you're going
to have to move to a new virtual cluster.
That's great to know.
Thanks so much, Srdan, for being here.
We're going to put some links to learn more in the description.
If you like this video,
we hope you like this video,
leave us a comment on how this is going to unblock you
for faster failovers or that thing.
We hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
>> Thank you, Anna.
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