Open innovation, customer choice, and reliability with SQL Server on SUSE

May 26, 2020

With nearly two decades of delivering joint innovation to meet changing business demands, Microsoft and SUSE continue to focus on enabling digital transformation for our customers, building on open source solutions, and a seamless collaborative support model for SUSE workloads on SQL Server and Azure.

To broaden deployment options for our customers, you can run SQL Server on-premises with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SLES 12, in the cloud with SLES-based Azure Virtual Machines, and in SQL Server SLES containers running on the SUSE Container as a Service (CaaS) Platform, and expect a consistent experience from on-premises to cloud. Customers will not need a separate repository or package requirements in case of SLES 12 SP5 and the guidelines documentation for quickstart installation remains current. Support levels are also updated in the release notes. Additionally, last week at SUSECON Digital we made announcements related to Azure Arc hybrid capabilities. Azure Arc enables deployment of Azure services anywhere and extends Azure management to any infrastructure across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments.

SQL Server 2019 on SLES 12 on-premises

Announcing SQL Server 2019 on SLES 12 SP5 is now fully supported for production use. With SQL Server 2019, you can take advantage of features such as intelligent query processing, data virtualization, accelerated database recovery, improved developer experiences, and much more deployed on the SUSE SLES 12 environment of your choice. See how SQL Server 2019 customers like Itaú Unibanco, a banking leader in Latin America, use the intelligent query processing capabilities in SQL Server 2019 with virtually no code changes to achieve incredible performance for several business-critical processes.

One major performance improvement in SUSE SLES 12 SP5 is the support for Forced Unit Access (FUA) for user-mode IO calls for XFS file system. Users of SQL Server on Linux may have been introduced to certain storage and IO flush related configurations due to the unavailability of FUA in user mode. With the introduction of FUA capability support in user mode for XFS filesystem by the SUSE engineering team, users can realize high-performance gains for IO-bound workloads on SQL Server.

Learn more about how you can get the best performance with SQL Server 2019 on SUSE SLES 12.

SQL Server 2019 on SLES 12 Azure Virtual Machines

For customers interested in running SQL Server as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the Azure Marketplace offers pre-configured SQL Server 2019 on SUSE SLES 12 Azure Virtual Machines. The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with High Availability Extension provides mission-critical uptime, fast failover, improved manageability, and easy configuration for Always-on Availability Groups (AG) for SQL Server High Availability setup on Azure. While users will be able to set up a pacemaker cluster on SUSE SLES VM on Azure, high availability in the SUSE repository will be enabled in a future SQL Server community update.

Currently, to have a highly available environment with SUSE on Azure, you can bring your own subscriptions to Azure SLES 12 SP5 and SUSE HA extension.

Customers can bring their SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance to the cloud with Azure Hybrid Benefit to maximize cost savings, and may also consider Azure Reserved VM Instances.

Learn how to get started running SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines on SUSE Linux in this on-demand webinar.

SQL Server on SUSE CaaS Platform

Deploying SQL Server in containers simplifies and speeds up deployments making it easier for application development, database DevOps, and deploying in production. Customers can run SQL Server on the Kubernetes-based SUSE CaaS Platform at-scale in your on-premises environment.

Learn more and get started today

There are a number of exciting free virtual sessions from SUSECON Digital for you to watch either live or on-demand. Here’s a list of all content from Microsoft at SUSECON Digital. Highlighted sessions include: