Deploying a standalone Azure VM running SQL Server into an availability zone

  • If i deploy a standalone Azure VM running SQL Server into an availavility zone; what will this achieve? Will i get two load balanced copies of the instance running from VM's out of two data centers in the zone with the data being synced? I think that is what the documentation is suggesting, but I cannot find any references which namecheck SQL Server specifically.

    Surely if this is what is achieved it would be more widely publihsed as a valid way to achieve SQL Server HA without paying for the additional node (deploying a VM into an availability zone incurs no additional cost).

    I have tried caryring out the deployment, and it works successfully but there is no information about which DC's within the zone are being used and i can't think of a way to test that i have H/A out of the box with no additional configuration required in SQL Server.

    Can anyone offer any advice or point me in the direction of some good resource which covers this topic?

    Thanks in advance!

  • The Availability Zone option protects you against an Azure data centre loss by keeping a second copy of the VM (and data) in another Azure data centre in the same region.  It's managed by Azure and will be used in the event that the first data centre fails.   It's not a load balanced solution (the second copy is not active/available).

    To protect against region loss you would need to implement something like VMs in 2 different regions with Always On Availability Groups synching data between them.

    If it's a single database, Azure SQL Database with a failover group might work.  Managed Instance also has failover groups.

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