As a part of our dedication to making sure that Microsoft Azure is the most effective place to run SQL Server and Home windows Server, Microsoft is worked up to announce that SQL Server on Azure Digital Machines simply achieved new, sooner efficiency benchmarks than ever earlier than. In keeping with a report from analyst agency GigaOm, prospects can get mission-critical efficiency for SQL Server on Azure Digital Machines as much as 57 p.c sooner and costing as much as 54 p.c much less than AWS EC2 on a price-performance foundation, with Azure Hybrid Profit and a three-year dedication.1 As Pam Lahoud wrote, this regular improve in efficiency and worth is the results of an ongoing sequence of investments within the core Azure infrastructure, together with the Ebdsv5 digital machine (VM) sequence which might be optimized in your database workloads and new Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage that brings you quicker efficiency than earlier than, as much as 70 p.c sooner than a 12 months in the past. However nice {hardware} isn’t all we now have in your SQL Server—Azure additionally has unmatched value presents, distinctive Home windows Server and SQL Server manageability options, and instruments and packages to get your workload to the cloud.
Azure offers essentially the most worth in your Home windows Server and SQL Server workloads with distinctive capabilities and presents that will let you save prices, time, and cut back complexity to do extra with much less. You’ll be able to save as much as 85 p.c over the usual pay-as-you-go charge leveraging Home windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Azure Hybrid Profit when migrating to Azure digital machines. Not solely will we enable you save while you transfer, however we need to enable you optimize your workloads in Azure. You will get essentially the most out of Azure on an ongoing foundation with suggestions to optimize your workloads and prices with Azure Advisor.
As well as, prospects can buy Azure Reserved Digital Machine Cases to lock in the most effective pricing on a selected digital machine occasion sequence for a one- or three-year interval. Should you want flexibility for dynamic workloads, take into account the brand new Azure financial savings plan for compute, a versatile pricing mannequin that unlocks financial savings while you decide to spending a hard and fast hourly quantity on choose compute providers for one or three years. Save no matter area, occasion sequence, or working system. Be taught extra within the Azure saving plan for compute announcement weblog.
Azure offers unmatched manageability for Home windows Server and SQL Server. By registering your SQL Server on Azure Digital Machines with SQL IaaS Agent Extension, you possibly can entry a plethora of advantages: decrease complete price of possession (TCO), strong and easy excessive availability/catastrophe restoration (HA/DR), and built-in and free safety and manageability. Registering SQL Server digital machines lets you swap between pay-as-you-go licenses or utilizing Azure Hybrid Profit to carry SQL Server licenses from on-premises to Azure straight throughout the Azure portal. Registration additionally simplifies the advanced administrative process of At all times On availability group deployment and lets you use the catastrophe restoration license sort, which is included together with your Azure Hybrid Profit or pay-as-you-go licensed main SQL Server occasion. Non-compulsory automated backup could be configured with backup encryption, configurable retention interval, and customized backup schedules. You can even arrange automated SQL Server safety updates inside customer-defined upkeep home windows and simple configuration of database encryption by Azure Key Vault integration, each of which let you handle your patching to raised meet your safety and compliance wants.
Save hours of day-to-day IT overhead for Home windows Server functions and knowledge by simplifying IT administration with Azure Automanage. Additional improve effectivity and workload uptime by reboot-less patching of Home windows Server VMs with Hotpatch, accessible solely on Azure.
Azure has digital machine and storage {hardware} designed in your most crucial SQL Server workloads. Azure Ev5 VMs are designed for memory-intensive, business-critical functions, relational database servers, and in-memory knowledge analytics workloads. The Ebdsv5 sequence of VMs, a part of the Ev5 household, are perfect for database and different I/O-intensive workloads as a result of they provide greater distant storage throughput and IOPS per vCPU than every other VM sequence in Azure. We just lately added to this lineup Azure Premium SSD v2, the following technology of Premium SSD Disk Storage that provides essentially the most superior general-purpose block storage resolution with the most effective value efficiency. Premium SSD v2 presents sub-millisecond disk latencies for demanding IO-intensive workloads at a low price.
Azure has nice locations for modernizing SQL Server. Azure SQL Managed Occasion is a managed, all the time up-to-date SQL occasion within the cloud, and it makes an incredible vacation spot for database modernization in Azure. It has nice efficiency as properly: as I’ve talked about beforehand, SQL Managed Occasion has as much as 5 occasions sooner efficiency whereas costing as much as 93 p.c lower than AWS RDS.2 Spend extra time innovating and fewer time patching, updating, and backing up your databases and understand as much as 40 p.c sooner time to worth.3 The hyperlink function of Azure SQL Managed Occasion connects SQL Servers hosted anyplace (supporting SQL Server 2019 and SQL Server 2022) to Azure SQL Managed Occasion, offering hybrid flexibility and database mobility. Utilizing close to real-time knowledge replication to the cloud, shift workloads to read-only secondaries on Azure to benefit from cloud-only options, efficiency, and scale. You can even select emigrate a number of functions on the identical time, at your individual tempo, with minimal downtime.
Azure presents free instruments earlier than, throughout, and after migration. Automate the transfer, achieve rightsizing insights to drive efficiencies, and keep optimized after the transfer: Azure Migrate and Azure Database Migration Service present built-in discovery, evaluation, migration, and modernization capabilities for SQL Server and Home windows Server workloads, together with extensibility options for ISV instrument integration. Scale back your migration prices and speed up your journey with knowledgeable help from Microsoft and companions by the Azure Migration and Modernization Program. The brand new Microsoft SQL + Apps Migration Manufacturing unit Program may help you assess and migrate qualifying low-complexity SQL Server and Home windows Server functions and databases to Azure for free of charge to you.4
Getting began with SQL Server on Azure
- Learn the full benchmark report for SQL Transaction Processing and Analytic Efficiency Value-Efficiency Testing.
- Watch and be taught with Microsoft Mechanics: Best choice for Database Migration into Azure.
- Be taught extra about saving time and enhancing safety by registering your SQL Server on Azure Digital Machines from this datasheet and our documentation.
- Speed up your modernization with our on-demand webinar: The right way to Migrate SQL Server from VM to SQL Managed Occasion.
1 Value-performance claims based mostly on knowledge from a research commissioned by Microsoft and performed by GigaOm in January 2023. The research in contrast value efficiency between SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Version on Home windows Server 2022 in Azure E32bds_v5 occasion sort with Premium SSD v2 disks and SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Version on Home windows Server 2022 in Amazon Net Companies Elastic Cloud Compute occasion sort r5b.8xlarge with Common Goal (gp3) volumes. Benchmark knowledge is taken from a GigaOm Transactional Area Check derived from a acknowledged business commonplace, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E) The Area Check doesn’t implement the total TPC-E and as such will not be akin to any revealed TPC-E benchmarks. Costs are based mostly on publicly accessible US pricing in East US for SQL Server on Azure Digital Machines and Oregon for AWS EC2 as of January 2023. The pricing incorporates three-year reservations for Azure and AWS compute pricing, and Azure Hybrid Profit for SQL Server and Home windows Server, and License Mobility for SQL Server in AWS, excluding Software program Assurance and help prices. Precise outcomes and costs might fluctuate based mostly on configuration and area.
2 Value-performance claims based mostly on knowledge from a research commissioned by Microsoft and performed by Principled Applied sciences in April 2022. The research in contrast efficiency and value efficiency between a 16 vCore, 64 vCore and 80 vCore Azure SQL Managed Occasion utilizing premium-series {hardware} on the business-critical service tier and the db.m6i.32xlarge, db.r5b.4xlarge and db.r5b.16xlarge choices for Amazon Net Companies Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) on SQL Server. Benchmark knowledge is taken from a Principled Applied sciences report utilizing acknowledged requirements, HammerDB TPROC-C, HammerDB TPROC-H and Microsoft MSOLTPE, a workload derived from TPC-E. The MSOLTPE is derived from the TPC-E benchmark and as such will not be akin to revealed TPC-E outcomes, as MSOLTPE outcomes don’t adjust to the TPC-E Specification. The outcomes are based mostly on a combination of read-only and replace intensive transactions that simulate actions present in advanced OLTP and analytics software environments. Value-performance is calculated by Principled Applied sciences as the price of working the cloud platform constantly divided by transactions per minute or per second throughput, based mostly upon the usual. Costs are based mostly on publicly accessible US pricing in South Central US for Azure SQL Managed Occasion and US East for AWS RDS as of April 2022 and incorporates Azure Hybrid Profit for SQL Server, excluding Software program Assurance and help prices. Efficiency and price-performance outcomes are based mostly upon the configurations detailed within the Principled Applied sciences report. Precise outcomes and costs might fluctuate based mostly on configuration and area.
3 Outcomes are based mostly on prospects interviews. “The Financial Worth of Migration On-premises SQL Server Cases to Microsoft Azure SQL Options,” a commissioned research performed by The Enterprise Technique Group on behalf of Microsoft, October 2020.
4 Topic to the constraints described within the full SQL + Apps Migration Manufacturing unit program specs right here, and offered that the SQL Server workloads are low complexity with no code adjustments, Microsoft agrees to evaluate and migrate SQL Server databases and SQL Server-associated functions out of your datacenter or AWS EC2 to Azure for free of charge to buyer. Migrations have to be accomplished by June 30, 2023.
