>> In previous episodes,
we've talked a lot about SQL Server on an Azure Virtual Machine.
But what about if you're running SQL Server on-premises?
How can you take advantage of
SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machine today?
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 once again by Amit,
a Group Program Manager on the Azure data team.
Thanks for joining us again.
>> Thanks, Anna. Glad to be back on the show and
it's great to be talking about SQL Server VMs again.
>> Yeah. Happy to have you and happy that you
continue our discussion about
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.
Now, so far we've talked
about some of the cost benefits and some of the things you can
get from a software assurance and
licensing perspective if you move to
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machine.
We also talked about some of
the benefits you just get from running the platform.
Some of them being around backups, around security,
around setting up things like availability groups,
and failover cluster instances.
In this video you're going to talk about how
your on-premises SQL Server can take advantage of Azure.
So I'm interested to hear how this is possible.
>> What we did was we looked at
what customers are doing with their SQL Server environments,
both in Azure and outside of Azure.
When we talk to customers,
we find that most of our customers have SQL Servers
running both outside Azure and in Azure.
Since our SQL Server features have the ability to
leverage VMs irrespective of where they're running, we thought,
why not enable some hybrid benefits that can really
help customers with certain scenarios
where Azure would really help,
not just from a TCO perspective,
but also enable some key business scenarios.
Let's look at what they are. The first one
I want to talk about is the Hybrid Failovers.
In one of the earlier episodes you saw that we
announced a new benefit
for high availability and disaster recovery.
After November 1st, you have the ability to get
free async DR cores if they were running
in Azure Virtual Machine and if they were running on-premises,
and you are leveraging Azure VM as the secondary async DR.
In this architecture, I have four servers.
All of them running
SQL Server irrespective of which edition or release,
it doesn't really matter as long as they follow
the rules for passive HA and DR.
In this case, the three of them are sitting
on-premises and the fourth one is
sitting in an Azure Virtual Machine.
In the past before November 1st,
you would have to license all but one,
which was Server 2, that is your HA and DR,
which is free with Software Assurance or subscription licenses.
Starting November 1st, you only have to license one of them.
We actually are getting
three additional replicas because you're
licensing all the cores on
the primary replica with Software Assurance.
So you're getting three.
In this case, 18 free cores because the primary had six cores.
This is one great way of setting
up Hybrid DR, and at the same time,
making it really cost-effective,
especially if it still running on-prem,
but you want an additional DR site.
In this case, we're thinking of
Azure as the DR site and we're seeing
customers leverage Azure as the disaster recovery site,
and at the same time saving costs.
That's one great benefit that I'm super excited about Anna,
and I'm looking forward for
more and more customers to leverage that.
In addition to that,
Cloud give you the ability to spawn resources and get rid of them,
as and when you see fit.
This is an example where we have two VMs or
two servers that are running a active passive configuration.
In this case, what this means is the primary replica is
serving applications and the secondary replicas
sitting as a passive sync secondary waiting
for a failover to happen in case there is an outage.
However, let's say you wanted to
have a secondary replica for leads,
and this might be because of year closing,
month closing, quarter closing,
or you're in e-commerce application and for a certain time you
need a vast capacity because you're running some promotion,
or you're having a save,
or maybe it's holiday season and you expect more traffic.
What you could actually do is you could
go into Azure Virtual Machine,
you could actually set up
a virtual machine with as many number of cores as you want.
In this case you don't have to use your hybrid benefit.
You can just use your pay-as-you-go licenses
and you can set this up with 12 cores,
16 cores, 32 cores,
however many you need and serve them for your users.
Or it could be transactional replication,
that's what I'm using here.
It could have been logged shipping read-only replicas,
it could also have been always on
availability groups with the asynchronous secondaries.
Once you're done with that vast workload for that time period,
you can just get rid of the VMs.
Essentially, what you paid for is just the capacity that you
used during the time when the machines were active and running.
That's another great query of not having to buy licenses up front,
but leveraging our flexible Pay As You Go
licensing while you're running for short periods of time in Azure.
>> Thanks, Amit. That's really interesting.
Not only can you use this in a scenario
where you don't want to over-provision,
like you think about in Azure,
but on-prem you don't have to buy extra hardware even.
You can just use Azure for
the licensing Pay As You-Go as well as
the extra compute that you might need,
is that a scenario you think is reasonable?
>> I would say that's a very valid scenario.
It's a hybrid scenario and for most purposes,
your users would not even figure out unless they're
connecting directly to the machines themselves.
If they're coming in from an application,
your users would not even know if they're hitting
a server on-premises or on Azure.
The beauty of this is everything just works like
SQL Server that you used to on-premises
and you're just using on-demand
compute and infrastructure availability in Azure,
and you're using a flexible licensing model in
Azure to basically account for the additional capacity you need.
This would be a very expensive proposition,
if you had to set this up for just for five days in your dataset.
>> Wow, that's cool.
Awesome. What other scenarios do you have.
>> One of the other scenarios.
This is more for dedicated host.
We see a lot of our enterprise customers leverage
this to bring down their costs of running SQL Server.
The feature or the Software Assurance benefit
is called unlimited virtualization.
What this allows you to do is,
if your host had 12 physical cores,
you could cover the physical host with 12 core licenses and
deploy as many number of VMs for Enterprise edition on them.
Now, what this does for you is it allows you to bring
down the cost of your SQL Server cores by
packing in as many virtual machines
and you're hedging on the fact that
not all the VMs together will
need a 100 percent CPU utilization at the same time.
This is a very common practice because,
a lot of on-premises environments actually
over-provision compute capacity on their VMs.
Now, if you bring this into Azure,
you lose that ability to use unlimited virtualization and VMs.
But now we have the option
of using Azure dedicated host where you can
actually license only the physical cores on the dedicated host,
and deploy as me number of SQL Server VMs as you want.
If you combine your Windows Server
and your SQL Server Azure Hybrid benefit,
that becomes a very high amount of cost savings.
That's another pattern that
your senior customers use quite a lot in Azure.
In addition to that, if you are still not ready to leverage Azure,
you could actually start leveraging
some of the services Azure offers.
We announced Azure Arc enable
SQL Server in public preview at Ignite this year.
What that does for you is it allows you to take some of
our Azure services like Azure Security Center,
Azure Log Analytics, and install
agents that can connect to your on-premises SQL Server instances.
You can get things which are really cool.
For example, this is a health assessment,
which basically assesses best practices
on your SQL Server Virtual Machine.
This specific one is for security and tells you about
various kinds of threats that
your SQL Server instance can be exposed to.
If you want to do a more holistic check,
you could do it health assessment for your SQL Server VMs,
and you could get a dashboard like this which tracks
all the different best practices that we're a read
off from working with our enterprise customers.
You can leverage this at zero to
minimal cost for a fleet of
SQL Server instances running in your environment.
These are two things that are in
preview and it's super exciting for us to see
on-premises customers leverage these for
their security and operational needs.
You can learn more about this by going
into our Azure portal and searching for Azure Arc,
or you could go to
aka.ms/azuresqlvm and learn more about SQL Server in
Azure VMs and our hybrid scenario.
Thank you for watching. Thank you,
Anna for having me on the show.
>> Awesome. Thanks so much Amit.
To our viewers, be sure to check those links.
We'll also put them in the description.
We hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
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