Arc Enabled Data Services – 7

In our previous post, we mentioned the 2 types of data services that are supported and able to be managed by our newly deployed Data Controller:

• Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance
• Azure Arc-enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale

In this pose we are going to have a look at the differences between an installation of Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

Azure SQL Managed Instance is an intelligent, scalable cloud database service that combines the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility with all the benefits of a fully managed and evergreen platform as a service.

Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance provides nearly the same features, functionality and user experience as Azure SQL Managed Instance, except it runs on your chosen version-supported Kubernetes hardware, inside of your data center or multi-cloud environment.

Arc-enabled SQL MI has the following Features and Capabilities:

• Supported Features and Services
• RDBMS High Availability
• RDBMS Scalability and Performance
• RDBMS Security
• RDBMS Manageability
• Programmability
• Tools
• Unsupported Features and Services

Like all things with the cloud versions or Box versions, Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance is available in 2 vCore Service Tiers:

• General Purpose – equivalent to Standard Edition
• Business Critical – equivalent to Enterprise Edition

Based on your workloads and general requirements, just like you would decide between Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, General Purpose Vs Business Critical Service tiers come with differing price points, features and resource limits.

You can take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB) with your current On-premises licenses when moving to Arc-enabled data services. You can see the differences above.

As you are deploying and managing on your chosen hardware in your chosen data center, your limit of scalability and High Availability comes down to the underlying hardware resources that you build your Kubernetes Cluster with.

In our next post we will have a look at deploying a Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.