Azure Stack HCI is a new hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) operating system packed with the latest security, performance, and feature updates. It promises to provide enterprises with a highly available, flexible, and cost-efficient platform to run a high-performance Microsoft SQL Server using state-of-the-art hardware and Storage Spaces Direct. The platform allows for greater scalability by providing the flexibility to run SQL servers in Virtual Machines (Windows or Linux) to consolidate multiple database workloads.
1. Aquire hardware:
You can buy hardware with Azure Stack HCI pre-installed or deploy the Azure Stack HCI system on your own hardware, depending on the type of workload.
2. Install the SQL Server on Azure Stack HCI:
You can install the SQL Server on VMs running either Windows or Linux.
3. Tuning the SQL Server: Microsoft provides a range of tools for monitoring SQL Server events and tuning the physical database design. To ensure the usefulness of the SQL server instances on Azure HCI, see Performance Monitoring and Tuning Tools.
4. Use SQL Server high availability features:
Azure Stack HCI provides Windows Server Failover Clustering, which facilitates hardware failure scenarios. In addition, the SQL Server also offers Always On Availability Groups (AG), which provides software and application robustness against failures through database-level high availability.
5. Set up Azure hybrid services: One of the key value propositions of Azure Stack HCI is its hybrid offering. You can use several services such as Azure Site Recovery or Azure Backup, to keep your SQL Server secure and backed up.
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