Azure Arc for SQL Server

• Azure Arc features for SQL Server allow customers to manage SQL Server installations running outside of Azure using Azure services.
• Arc features could interest customers who use SQL Server outside Azure for regulatory, business, or performance reasons.
• Arc could also help organizations manage a mix of SQL Server servers hosted in Azure, on-premises, or in other cloud providers.
• Features for SQL Server have dependencies with other Arc services that will incur additional Azure cost.

Azure Arc can help customers centralize management of SQL Server deployments (on-premises, in Azure, or in other clouds, such as Amazon Web Services [AWS] and Google Cloud Platform) and leverage Azure features, which can help customers meet compliance requirements that may have prevented them from using Azure-hosted services. However, Arc requires connectivity to Azure, which could expose sensitive information to Microsoft, and most features incur subscription cost.

Overview

Azure Arc is a set of capabilities for using Azure management interfaces to work with deployments hosted outside of Azure. (For an overview of Arc, see the sidebar “Arc Service Overview.”) For SQL Server, Arc delivers two types of server management options that are used together for managing SQL Server deployments.