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It’s not that hard to install SQL Server, but rarely does a SQL Server deployment consist purely of an installation. There are challenges, such as designing storage, deploying networking, and configuring backup. Have you ever been in the situation where a developer asks you to restore a database, and it’s the first time that you’ve ever heard of that database, so there’s no backup to restore? I sure have, and it’s not fun! Microsoft is making it much easier for you to deploy SQL Server inside of Azure VMs in the Azure Portal. Read on to learn more.
When you choose to deploy a virtual machine with SQL Server 2014 and a Resource Manager deployment model, you’ll see the new SQL Server deployment and configuration experience. A new child blade, SQL Server Settings, is added to the Create Virtual Machine Blade, which lets you easily pre-configure SQL Server before the virtual machine is even deployed.
The goal here is to simplify common tasks and speed up the configuration. The result should be that non-DBAs, such as developers and IT pros, produce better installations of SQL Server.
Improved experience of deploying SQL Server 2014 VMs using ARM (Image Credit: Microsoft)
The new SQL Server Settings blade (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
Microsoft says that:
In the past, configuring SQL Server connectivity was not trivial.
It’s true; you had to log into the machine, know where and how in SQL Server to configure the required port, and reconfigure the Windows firewall to allow SQL clients to connect to the database server.
If public access was required, then you would also need to configure an endpoint, which is fun with ARM load balancers right now because it is both complex and only supports PowerShell at the time of writing. The new experience makes things quite easy. You can choose a TCP port (1433 by default), configure authentication, and set what kinds of connections will be possible:
I’ve discussed how you can configure storage using multiple data disks to meet the requirements of heavy workloads, such as SQL Server. The new SQL experience makes this easier; you specify your requirements and workload, and Azure will configure the required data disks for you.
Configure data disks for SQL based on performance requirements (Image Credit: Microsoft)
Note that your virtual machine specification will limit the performance and scalability profiles of the data disks.
You can configure automated patching of your machine’s guest OS and SQL Server:
Configure automated patching of Window Server and SQL Server (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
You can opt into automated backup of all of your SQL databases. This feature backs up databases to a normal Azure storage account — this is not performed by Azure Backup. You can retain up to 30 days of data to a storage account of your choice. You can choose to encrypt the data; a password to protect an Azure-generated and managed certificate, and this certificate is used to encrypt the backups.
Automated short-term backup of SQL databases (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
Azure Key Vault provides secure key management in the cloud using FIPS-validated hardware security modules (HSMs). Using this feature, you configure SQL Server to store encryption keys in Azure Key Vault.
You are presented with a summary before the virtual machine is created. For the below example, I selected a DS3 virtual machine that required 12800 IOPS and 6 TBS of storage, with a transactional processing (OLTP) workload. Note how the virtual machine is going to be created with 6 Premium Storage data disks.
Summary of SQL virtual machine before deployment (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
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