The benefits of using HPE GreenLake for private cloud SQL Server deployments
Learn why HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition combined with Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server creates a powerful solution that extends Microsoft Azure services to SQL Server instances for a hybrid cloud experience.
– By Richard Wuehler, HPE Storage Solutions engineering team
Your businesses demands efficient solutions that bridge the gap between on-premises infrastructure and public cloud services. Whether in your data center or edge site locations like retail stores, Azure Arc brings centralized management and control to your Microsoft SQL Server environment.
The importance of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is that no matter which underlying HPE GreenLake cloud-managed storage is used – whether HPE Alletra Storage Servers or HPE Primera – your SQL Server database can be Azure Arc -enabled for a holistic database management experience.
Solution overview
At the heart of this solution is HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition using the power of HPE Alletra dHCI using HPE Alletra 6000 to create mission critical virtualized SQL Server deployments with six 9s data availability. Once created, the virtual machines and SQL Server instances can be onboarded to Azure so users can benefit from the Azure services needed for their business.
A recent technical paper details how to create and manage the SQL Server infrastructure – and how to Azure Arc enable (connect to Azure service) virtual machines and SQL Server instances. Here’s a summary of that paper.
Let’s start with this configuration showing the beauty of this on-premises solution including:
- The fully integrated server, storage, network, and virtualization solution
- Simplified storage performance-tuning using vSphere storage policies
- Cloud-based management with automated storage insight and maintenance features
- Simplicity when scaling either compute or storage, or both together
- Azure Arc connectivity for virtual machines and SQL Server instances
- Ability to create public cloud Azure virtual machines from HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition
Configuration guidance
Offering guidance at every step of the way, the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform provides context aware articles to help users. From here, users can view the focused articles and download the full help document. This figure shows the Cloud Console Articles icon located in the upper right of a page.
A few preliminary steps for the solution implementation are:
- Create HPE GreenLake and Microsoft Azure accounts
- Deploy and onboard the HPE Alletra dHCI to HPE GreenLake
- Connect Private Cloud Business Edition to Azure (if creating Azure VMs from GreenLake)
Steps to creating the virtual machines for your SQL Server database are:
- Create a vSphere datastore
- Create storage provisioning policies for intent-based provisioning
- Create an OVF template for the virtual machines
- Create one or more virtual machines (see figure)
Once your virtual machine is created, install the SQL Server database.
The easiest way to Arc enable SQL Server is while Arc enabling the virtual machine - all at the same time, which can be performed in several ways. The easiest way to do this from the Server Manager interface by clicking on the Azure Arc Management > Disabled link. This will install the Azure Connected Machine (AzCM) agent after which you onboard the machine and SQL Server instance by clicking the Configure link.
If the SQL Server instance fails to onboard to Azure with the machine, or SQL Server was installed after the machine was Arc-enabled, one of the easiest ways to Arc-enable SQL Server is from the Azure portal. Follow these steps:
- Navigate to the Resource Group containing the Arc-enabled machine.
- Select the Arc-enabled machine with the SQL Server instance to onboard
- Select Extensions in the left frame and click the Add (+ icon)
- Select the Azure Extension for SQL Server and click Next
- Answer the licensing question and complete the task
This wraps up the description of how to obtain a hybrid SQL Server cloud experience with on-premises security and performance along with six 9s data availability – plus the capability to easily and economically upgrade either compute or storage independently.
Now one more preview from the technical paper
The chart shows a Perfmon graph from one of the virtualized SQL Server databases running a HammerDB OLAP workload before and after a throughput throttle was removed using a storage policy. The upper bold line is total CPU utilization which increased by 30% and maxed out the CPU, while the lower bold line is total Disk Bytes/second of the data, tempdb, and transaction log disks combined. It’s interesting to notice how important vSphere Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) profiles can be to control system resources.
Conclusion
HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition using HPE Alletra dHCI with intelligent features like intent-based provisioning enables quick on-premises virtual machine provisioning for SQL Server databases.
By combining Azure Arc with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition, you unlock the agility of a hybrid public/private cloud while maintaining control over your SQL Server environment.
Whether you’re an IT decision maker, infrastructure administrator, or database specialist, I recommend you check out the complete Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server 2022 using HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition technical paper to learn how to provision a hybrid Azure SQL Server deployment.
To dig deeper on this topic, refer to the complete Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server 2022 using HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition paper.
Meet HPE Storage Experts blogger Richard Wuehler
Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/HPE_Storage
linkedin.com/showcase/hpestorage/
hpe.com/storage
StorageExperts
Our team of Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage experts helps you dive deep into relevant data storage and data protection topics.
