Announcing General Availability of Zone Redundancy for Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical

Zone redundancy in SQL Managed Instance Business Critical service tier is now generally available. In addition, zone redundancy in the SQL Managed Instance General Purpose service tier is now in Public Preview. These capabilities are available for all instances enrolled in the November 2022 feature wave.

Azure regions are constructed in two different ways: single-zone regions and multi-zone regions. Single-zone region consist of one physical location, while multi-zone regions consist of multiple physical locations forming Azure Availability Zones. 

Zone redundant configuration in Azure SQL Managed Instance uses Azure Availability Zones to replicate your instances across multiple physical locations within an Azure region. By selecting zone redundant configuration, you can make your managed instances resilient to a much larger set of failures, including catastrophic datacenter outages, without any changes of the application logic. For more information see the zone redundant availability section in the Azure SQL documentation. 

How to enable the zone redundant configuration

Zone redundant configuration can be enabled for all instances that are enrolled in the November 2022 feature wave– to learn more about feature wave, please consult this blog.

Once the zone redundant option is enabled, Azure SQL Managed Instance will automatically reconfigure the instance. You can apply this setting by using Portal, ARM API, PowerShell or Azure CLI.

Why is zone redundancy important?

Zone redundancy offers another option in the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) spectrum, providing you with even more flexibility to choose the optimal BCDR strategy for your applications: The following table illustrates the BCDR options in Azure SQL MI:

Configure Zone Redundancy using Azure Portal

The following workflow illustrates how to use Azure portal to configure a new Business Critical managed instance to use zone redundant configuration.

Step 1: Select Configure Managed Instance in the Create Azure SQL Managed Instance tab

Step 2: In the Compute + storage page, select Yes in the “Zone redundancy” section to make the instance zone redundant then click Apply

Step 3: Choose one of the compatible redundancy options for backup storage: 

• ZRS (Zone Redundant Storage)
• GZRS (Geo Zone Redundant Storage)

Learn more about different options for backup storage redundancy in this blog.

Configure Zone Redundancy using ARM

The following REST API commands can be used to enable the zone redundant configuration using the zoneRedundant {false, true} parameter.

• Managed Instances - Create Or Update - REST API (Azure SQL Database) | Microsoft Docs
• Managed Instances - Update - REST API (Azure SQL Database) | Microsoft Docs
• Managed Instances - Get - REST API (Azure SQL Database) | Microsoft Docs

Configure Zone Redundancy using PowerShell

The following PowerShell commands can be used to enable the zone redundant configuration using the –ZoneRedundant switch parameter

• New-AzSQLInstance
• Set-AzSQLInstance
• Get-AzSQLInstance

Example:
New-AzSqlInstance -Name managedInstance1 -ResourceGroupName ResourceGroup01 -Location westcentralus -AdministratorCredential (Get-Credential) -SubnetId "/subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/resourcegroup01/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/vnet_name/subnets/subnet_name" -LicenseType LicenseIncluded -StorageSizeInGB 1024 -VCore 4 -SkuName BC_Gen5 -ZoneRedundant

Configure Zone Redundancy using Azure CLI

The following Azure CLI commands can be used to enable the zone redundant configuration using the --zone-redundant –z {false, true} parameter.

• az sql mi create
• az sql mi update
• az sql mi show

Example:
az sql mi create -g mygroup -n myinstance -l mylocation -i -u myusername -p mypassword --subnet /subscriptions/{SubID}/resourceGroups/{ResourceGroup}/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/{VNETName}/subnets/{SubnetName} -z

Regional Availability

Zone redundant Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical tier is available in majority of the zone-enabled regions in Azure, and additional regions will be added over time. For up-to-date information on regions that support the preview of zone redundancy in SQL Managed Instance, consult this Azure SQL Managed Instance documentation page.

Pricing

Zone Redundant SQL Managed Instances will be available with no additional charge until the end of calendar year 2023. Starting from January 1^st, 2024, we will start charging listed prices for these instances using the following pricing model for the zone-redundant managed instances:

• No upcharge for the “SQL license” part of the price
• 60% upcharge for the “compute” part of the price
• 100% upcharge for the “storage” part of the price

Here’s a quick example using a 4 vCore Business Critical instance with standard-series hardware and 1 TB of reserved storage (East US region, pay as you go pricing model, monthly rates, US$)

Pricing comparison for a non-ZR and ZR config  

Summary

In this article, we introduced the new zone redundancy option that makes your Azure SQL Managed Instances resilient to a much larger set of failures, including catastrophic datacenter outages, without any changes of the application logic.

Next steps:

• Get started with SQL Managed Instance with our Quick Start reference guide.
• Learn more about Azure SQL Managed Instance zone redundancy and high availability.
• Learn more about the latest innovation in Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Learn more about the general availability of November 2022 feature wave for SQL Managed Instance
• Video overview of zone redundancy in Azure SQL Managed Instance - YouTube