Zone Redundancy for Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical service tier

[Edit 12/6/2023 | SQL MI Zone Redundancy is GA for Business Critical and in Public Preview for General Purpose (announced on 11/15/2023).]

[Edit: Video presentation on SQL MI Zone redundancy.]

Now available in preview as part of the November 2022 feature wave, you can enable the zone redundant configuration for your new and existing Azure SQL Managed Instances that use the Business Critical service tier.  

Zone redundant configuration utilizes Azure Availability Zones to replicate your instances across multiple physical locations within an Azure region. By selecting zone redundant configuration, you can make your Business Critical 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 Business Critical service tier zone redundant availability section in the Azure SQL documentation. 

How to enable the zone redundant configuration

Zone redundant configuration can be enabled for all Business Critical instances that have received the November 2022 feature wave update – to learn more about November 2022 feature wave, please consult this blog.

Once the zone redundant option is enabled, Azure SQL Managed Instance will automatically reconfigure the instance. You can configure this setting by using Portal or ARM API. The support for CLI and PowerShell will be coming in the next several months.

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 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

Regional Availability

Zone redundant Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical tier is available in some 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 February 2023. Starting from March 1^st, 2023, 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 announced in Nov 2022.