Migrate your Microsoft SQL Server workloads to Azure VMware Solution

Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most widely used databases on-premises, deployed by many customers as the core of their business-critical applications and services. Azure VMware Solution is the ideal solution for those customers planning to move their workloads to

the cloud without major changes and leveraging their investments and existing skills in VMware technologies.

Migrating those workloads will also enable the possibility of taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server for their SQL workloads and save significant costs in Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server licenses.

The Azure VMware Solution product group has created a series of guides to help customers plan the migration of their SQL Server workloads to Azure VMware Solution and enable Azure Hybrid Benefit.

These guides cover three different migration scenarios:

• Migrate SQL Server standalone instances.

This guide describes the procedure to migrate standalone SQL Server instances, relying on HCX vMotion Migration.

• Migrate SQL Server Failover Clusters.

Migrating Failover Clusters is the most challenging scenario, given the specific needs of shared disks for the cluster. The procedure relays on HCX as well but using Cold Migration, requiring a full stop of the database and the virtual machines forming the cluster.

• Migrate SQL Server Always On Availability Groups.

Finally, migrating SQL Server Always On Availability Groups procedure is detailed in this guide. Using HCX vMotion and database replication mechanism customers will be able to seamlessly migrate their Always On clusters to Azure VMware Solution.

If you are interested in the Azure VMware Solution, please use these resources to learn more about the service: 

• Homepage: Azure VMware Solution | Microsoft Azure
• Learn: Run VMware resources on Azure VMware Solution Training
• Documentation: Azure VMware Solution
• Azure CLI: Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) Overview
• PowerShell module: Az.VMware Module
• Terraform provider: azurerm_vmware_private_cloud Terraform Registry
• GitHub repository: Azure/azure-vmware-solution
• Cloud Adoption Framework: Introduction to the Azure VMware Solution adoption scenario
• Network connectivity scenarios: Enterprise-scale network topology and connectivity for Azure VMware Solution
• Enterprise Scale Landing Zone: Enterprise-scale for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution
• Enterprise Scale GitHub repository: Azure/Enterprise-Scale-for-AVS
• Microsoft Ignite 2022: Azure VMware Solution Update – New Features and Capabilities (microsoft.com)
• VMware homepage: VMware to Azure Migration Solutions
• VMware Hands-on Labs: Azure VMware Solution Hands-on Labs
• VMware Cloud Tech Zone: Azure VMware Solution
• VMware Explore 2022: VMware Explore Video Library
• Learning Resources: Azure VMware Solution (AVS) (microsoft.github.io)

Author Bio

Juan Manuel Rey is a Senior Technical Program Manager in the Azure VMware Solution product group at Microsoft. With near 24 years of experience in the industry, he has extensive background on Linux and Open Source, VMware and cloud technologies.