Microsoft SQL Server on Linux

We are happy to share some of our SQL Server on Linux experience with you. Feel free to contact us for additional information.

Getting started with SQL Server on Linux

Installing Microsoft SQL Server on Linux is relatively easy. The installation process follows a familiar to Linux administrators pattern.

First, you need to add the SQL Server repository to your package manager. Then, after you update the package list,  you can install the mssql-server package. Finally, you need to run mssql-conf setup to configure the SA password and edition.

The upgrade process also provides the Linux-native user experience. Administrators can update SQL Server 2017 instances on Linux using their existing package update/upgrade processes.

What’s available on Linux?

Here’s a short list of features that you can use running SQL Server on Linux.

• Support for RHEL, Ubuntu, SLES, Docker
• Package-based installs
• Support for Open Shift, Docker Swarm
• Failover clustering via Pacemaker
• Backup/Restore
• SSMS on Windows connected to Linux
• Command-line tools: sqlcmd, bcp
• Transparent Data Encryption
• Backup Encryption
• SCOM management pack
• DMVs
• Table partitioning
• SQL Server Agent
• Full-Text Search
• Integration Services
• Active Directory (integrated) authentication
• TLS for encrypted connections
• In-Memory OLTP
• Columnstore indexes
• Query Store
• Compression
• Always Encrypted
• Row-Level Security, Data Masking
• Auditing
• Service Broker
• CLR
• JSON, XML

Architectural solutions with SQL Server on Linux

With SQL Server on Linux, you can dramatically simplify high availability and disaster recovery features of your mission-critical systems. You can now create availability groups that span Windows and Linux nodes and scale out your analytics workloads across multiple operating systems.

Here’s an example of an enterprise solution with mission-critical HA and hybrid DR:

• Multiple node failover clustering on Windows and Linux (3 synchronous replicas and up to 9 total replicas)
• Multiple database failover as a group
• Fully readable secondaries for backup or reporting operations
• Distributed Availability Groups provide DR resiliency and enhance read scale by increasing the number of readable secondaries across geographies
• Read scale-out without cluster dependency

You can also improve read concurrency with read-scale availability groups. This is a cool new feature, implemented in SQL Server 2017. You can create read-scale availability groups without the need for a cluster manager. You can add up to 17 read-only replicas to a read-scale availability group. Read-only replicas might be geographically distributed. Read-scale Availability Groups support both Linux and Windows. So, you can improve the reliability of your database system with SQL Server on Linux, saving costs on replica licenses.

You can configure a shared-storage high-availability cluster with Linux to allow the SQL Server instance to failover from one node to another. Failover clusters provide instance level protection to improve recovery time by allowing SQL Server to failover between two or more nodes.

You can make Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups work together to ensure data is accessible despite failures, as shown on the picture below.

You can then even opt for running a primary replica in FCI in the primary data center for HA, and then place multiple secondary replicas in the remote data centers for DR.