More vCore options for SQL MI Business Critical for better price/performance and flexibility

Microsoft

Jan 30, 2024

Recently, we announced a number of Azure SQL Managed Instance improvements in Business Critical tier. In this article, we would like to highlight the more granular selection of the number of vCores for both premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware generations.

What is a vCore?

A vCore represents a unit of database compute resources. It is a logical CPU that provides processing power to handle your workloads and queries.

The number of vCores in Azure SQL Managed Instance determines the amount of compute resources allocated to your database instance. This directly impacts the performance and scalability of the instance; more vCores provide higher processing power, which can help in handling larger workloads and improving query performance.

What is new?

Customers used to have 10 choices for the number of vCores for SQL MI: 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 64, 80 vCores and newly offered 96 and 128 vCores.

We introduced 6 additional vCore click stops in Azure SQL MI Business Critical: 6, 10, 12, 20, 48 and 56 vCores. Going forward, customers have 16 choices for the number of vCores for both premium-series and premium-series memory optimized SQL MI Business Critical: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96 and 128 vCores.

These new options allow customers to scale their workloads more granularly, enabling them to optimize their costs through more measured increases of CPU vCores or allowing consolidation to take place without paying for the extra cores.

Now you do not have to double your 8-vCore SQL Managed instance to get more CPU power, you may simply resize it to 10 or 12 vCores and thereby save 75 or 50% of what you would spend previously by going straight to 16-vCore instance. A similar story applies to the other new options.

Furthermore, you can now consolidate several of your existing SQL Managed instances into one SQL MI more efficiently for the same cost and easier management. For example, you can consolidate two instances, one of 16 vCores and one of 32 vCores, right into one Managed instance of 48 vCores with no additional cost (instead of buying surplus of 16 vCores by landing them onto one 64-vCore instance).

Last example, but not least, is that you may resize your managed instance if you indicate that you do not use as many vCores as you had to buy due to more restrictive resource limitations. Decreasing your managed instance size, you may significantly decrease your total costs.

Why is more granular selection of number of vCores important?

Cost benefits and improved price/performance: Users can optimize costs by choosing the exact amount of CPU resources needed for their workload. This flexibility ensures that users are not overpaying for resources they do not require and helps avoid under-provisioning of resources due to prohibitive costs, which could lead to performance issues.

Enhanced performance efficiency, easy scalability, and optimized resource usage: Offering a range of CPU vCore options allows users to select the configuration that best aligns with the performance needs of their specific workload. Users can adjust the number of CPU vCores as their workload grows or changes, ensuring that the SQL Managed Instance can adapt to evolving business needs. This fine-grained control allows for a more customized and optimized infrastructure configuration, enhancing the overall efficiency of SQL Managed Instances.

How to monitor vCore usage on SQL Managed Instance?

There are many ways to monitor the vCore usage of your instance, here are a few:

In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):

Go to Object Explorer; right-click on your instance; expand Reports; expand Standard Reports; select Performance Dashboard:

Using Azure portal:

Using a script:

select top 1000 avg_cpu_percent, start_time, end_time from sys.server_resource_stats order by start_time desc

If you decide to scale your managed instance, you can do so from Azure portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI or ARM templates. You can also utilize ‘online scaling’ with minimal downtime. See Scale resources - Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn.

Summary

More granular control of vCores in Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical offers more flexibility, brings the opportunity for cost savings and improves your price/performance. If you're still new to Azure SQL Managed Instance, now is a great time to get started and take Azure SQL Managed Instance for a spin!

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