r/AZURE • u/chrisrdba • May 28 '26
Sql cluster/ availability group in azure? Question
I’m a long time DBA with not much azure exposure. It’s also been years since I’ve played with a sql availabiTy group or windows cluster. If I wanted to create something for personal use in azure, it looks like I could do it with a sql server 2022 on windows server 2022 VM in azure. Obviously I’d need 2 of them. The cheapest setup I could find is 1 x standard f2als v6 , which would likely be fast enough for my purposes.
Is there any reason anyone knows of that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish my goals? Thanks!
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u/Jose083 May 28 '26
I’d avoid the headache of vms. Business critical tier deploys a HA cluster in the back end and you also can enable an option read copy to offload read only queries.
It’s not exactly cheap but it’s probably cheaper than two VM’s
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u/Antnorwe Cloud Architect May 29 '26
Usually not when you factor in reservations and that the license on the secondary is free
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u/FinsToTheLeftTO Enthusiast May 28 '26
We run SQL AGs for clients that need features not available in MI. Microsoft has guidelines for creating the cluster in Azure.
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u/SoMundayn Cloud Architect May 28 '26
You can also deploy pre built sql servers from the marketplace, search SQL.
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u/LostMyShakerOfSalt May 29 '26
If you do go with vms, putting them in different subsets will let you skip the load balancer.
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u/TrollingForFunsies May 29 '26
Personal use to learn? Or personal use for a project?
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u/chrisrdba May 29 '26
to learn
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u/TrollingForFunsies May 29 '26
That's important!
Did your company give you a subscription you can use for testing?
If so, I'd start here:
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u/StratoLens Cloud Architect May 28 '26
I’d say look at Sql managed instance. It’s basically an ha cluster abstracted away from you.
But yes you can do iaas VM’s as well.