I was recently watching the first session of the Azure SQL Bootcamp by Anna Hoffman (twitter) and Bob Ward (blog|twitter) and among the many cool things they discussed is the fact that a virtual machine with SQL Server installed can be handled differently in the portal than just a normal virtual machine. Here are some of the things that you can currently do through the portal (remember, this is the cloud so things change almost daily):
- View properties. i.e. Version, edition, and license type.
- Free space on your data drive.
- Enable/disable SQL authentication and Azure key vault integration.
- Some automated patching.
- Database backups.
- High availability (in preview).
When you create an Azure VM using one of the templates that already has SQL Server installed it will automatically be added to the SQL virtual machines list.
That said, if you install SQL on a VM yourself or have an older VM that you want to register it’s not overly difficult. You can see the instructions here.