Announcing General Availability of Azure Portal Experience to Deploy Multi-Subnet Availability Group

This past November we announced the public preview of the Azure portal experience to deploy a multi-subnet Availability Group (AG) for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. Today, we are excited to announce general availability (GA) of the end-to-end deployment experience.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines supports many High Availability (HA) & Disaster Recovery (DR) technologies and with this new deployment experience, we have made it even easier for customers to deploy an AG with just a few clicks. A multi-subnet configuration helps to match an on-premises experience connecting to your AG listener and eliminates the need to use an Azure Load Balancer.

There are two entry points to start an availability group deployment in the Azure portal. The first option is to search the Azure Marketplace for "SQL Server High Availability" and find the SQL Server with High Availability tile.

The second option is to search for Azure SQL from the Azure portal, select +Create to open the Select SQL deployment option. Under SQL virtual machines, choose the SQL Server image and select the High availability checkbox:

Customers using this method can create up to 9 new Azure VMs with SQL Server, a Windows failover cluster, availability group, and listener. The configuration follows our best practices for high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) and this deployment method supports SQL Server 2016 and later on Windows Server 2016 and later.

With the GA release, we have added:

• Support for Group Managed Service Accounts (GMSA)
  
• Trusted launch for Azure virtual machines
  
• The ability to assign each VM to an availability zone, if needed
  
• A prerequisite validation script to help reduce deployment issues
  

In order to have a successful deployment, verify you have the following prerequisites in place:

• A virtual network with custom DNS server IP address configured
  
• A domain controller VM in the same virtual network
  
• The following account permissions:
  
  • A domain user account that has Create Computer Object permissions in the domain. This user will create the cluster, availability group, and will install SQL Server
    
  • A domain SQL Server service account to control SQL Server. This should be the same account for every SQL Server VM that you want to add to the availability group.
    

Learn More

Review the following articles for more information about setting up a multi-subnet AG:

• Use the Azure portal to configure a multiple-subnet availability group for SQL Server on Azure VMs
  
• Tutorial: Prerequisites for availability groups in multiple subnets (SQL Server on Azure VMs)
  

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