Public Preview: Zone-Redundant Next-Gen General Purpose for Azure SQL Managed Instance

UrosMilanovic

Microsoft

Aug 17, 2026

Organizations can now take advantage of all the benefits of Next-Gen General Purpose while meeting strict high availability and compliance requirements.

Customers no longer need to choose between the latest General Purpose architecture and zone-level resiliency. With the public preview of zone redundancy for Next-Generation General Purpose Azure SQL Managed Instance, organizations can now take advantage of all the benefits of Next-Generation General Purpose while meeting strict high availability and compliance requirements through Availability Zone protection.

When Next-Generation General Purpose became generally available, it introduced a modernized General Purpose architecture delivering improved performance, greater scalability, enhanced flexibility, and better price-performance for Azure SQL Managed Instance workloads. Since then, customers have increasingly adopted the architecture to modernize SQL workloads, consolidate databases, and optimize total cost of ownership.

Today, we're extending those benefits to customers who require zone-level resiliency. With zone redundancy now available in public preview, customers can realize all the advantages of Next-Generation General Purpose while meeting the same zone-level availability requirements previously available only with Classic General Purpose.

This milestone brings full high-availability parity between Classic General Purpose and Next-Generation General Purpose, removing one of the last major reasons for customers to remain on the previous architecture.

Closing the last major gap

Zone redundancy has consistently been one of the most requested capabilities for Next-Generation General Purpose.

Since its introduction, Next-Generation General Purpose has provided substantial improvements in scalability and flexibility, including support for up to 128 vCores, up to 32 TB of storage, up to 500 databases per instance, configurable IOPS, and flexible memory sizing. Customers can optimize resources for their workload requirements while continuing to benefit from the simplicity and compatibility of Azure SQL Managed Instance.

With today's announcement, these capabilities can now be combined with zone-level resiliency, enabling customers to deploy highly available business-critical workloads on the latest General Purpose architecture without compromise.

In addition, the flexible memory option for zone-redundant Next-Generation General Purpose instances is also available in public preview, providing even greater flexibility to balance performance requirements and infrastructure costs.

Built-in high availability, now with Zone-level protection

Azure SQL Managed Instance has always been designed for high availability.

Next-Generation General Purpose delivers built-in high availability through its distributed architecture, leveraging Service Fabric together with fault domains and update domains to minimize the impact of hardware failures, software updates, and planned maintenance events. This architecture enables applications to remain available even during infrastructure events and maintenance operations.

As a result, single-zone deployments provide a 99.99% availability SLA.

For organizations with more demanding availability requirements, zone redundancy distributes service components across multiple Availability Zones within a region. This provides protection against zone-level failures and increases the availability SLA to 99.995%.

While many workloads are well served by single-zone deployments, organizations in regulated industries and mission-critical environments often require zone-redundant architectures as part of compliance, operational resilience, or business continuity requirements. With today's preview, these customers can now adopt Next-Generation General Purpose without sacrificing those requirements.

Regional availability

Zone redundancy for Next-Generation General Purpose is available in public preview in all regions where the underlying ESAN infrastructure supports zone-redundant deployments.

For the latest list of supported regions, check out the documentation page containing the regions where Elastic SAN is currently available and the supported redundancy options.

Regions that do not yet support ESAN-based zone redundancy are not included in the preview at this time. Additional regions will become available as platform support expands.

Upgrading existing deployments

Whether you are already running Next-Generation General Purpose or remain on Classic General Purpose, adopting zone-redundant Next-Generation General Purpose is designed to be straightforward and transparent.

Enable zone redundancy on existing Next-gen General Purpose instances

Customers already running Next-Generation General Purpose can enable zone redundancy directly on existing instances and immediately benefit from enhanced resiliency and a higher availability SLA.

Move from classic General Purpose zone-redundant to Next-generation General Purpose zone-redundant

Customers currently running Classic General Purpose with zone redundancy can migrate to Next-Generation General Purpose while preserving zone-level resiliency and gaining access to the latest platform architecture, resource flexibility, and scalability improvements.

This provides a natural modernization path for existing deployments and allows customers to standardize on the future architecture of the General Purpose tier.

Online operation with a short failover

Enabling zone redundancy or migrating between architectures is performed as an online management operation.

During most of the operation, Azure SQL Managed Instance provisions and synchronizes the new infrastructure while the existing deployment continues serving application traffic. Near the end of the operation, a brief failover occurs as client connections are switched from the existing infrastructure to the newly provisioned environment.

For more information about management operations, expected behavior, and application connectivity considerations, see management operations overview article.

Protecting workloads beyond a single region

For customers running in regions where zone redundancy is not currently available, or for customers seeking protection from broader regional outages, Failover Groups remain the recommended solution.

Failover Groups enable disaster recovery across Azure regions by maintaining a secondary managed instance and providing automatic or manual failover capabilities when needed. This approach helps organizations meet business continuity objectives even when Availability Zone protection is unavailable or when protection from regional outages is required.

Optimize disaster recovery costs with License Free failover rights

Customers implementing disaster recovery through Failover Groups can further optimize costs through Azure SQL License Free failover rights.

When the secondary managed instance is maintained exclusively for standby disaster recovery purposes and is not used for read-only workloads, SQL Server licensing costs do not apply to the secondary environment. Customers pay only for the compute resources required to maintain disaster recovery readiness, helping reduce overall total cost of ownership.

Planning costs

The Azure SQL Managed Instance pricing page and Azure Pricing Calculator have been updated to include the latest zone-redundant Next-Generation General Purpose offerings.

These tools can help customers evaluate deployment options, compare availability architectures, and estimate costs associated with zone redundancy and disaster recovery configurations.

Get started

Zone redundancy for Next-Generation General Purpose marks the completion of an important milestone in the evolution of Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Customers can now combine the performance, scalability, flexibility, and operational advantages of Next-Generation General Purpose with zone-level resiliency and a 99.995% availability SLA. Whether deploying new workloads, enabling zone redundancy on existing Next-Generation General Purpose instances, or modernizing Classic General Purpose deployments, organizations now have a clear path to adopting the latest General Purpose architecture without compromise.