SQL Server 2019 preview containers now available
Starting in SQL Server 2017 with support for Linux and containers, Microsoft has been on a journey of platform and operating system choice. With SQL Server 2019 preview, we are making it easier to adopt SQL Server in containers by enabling new HA scenarios and adding supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux container images. Today we are happy to announce the availability of SQL Server 2019 preview Linux-based container images on Microsoft Container Registry, Red Hat-Certified Container Images, and the SQL Server operator for Kubernetes, which makes it easy to deploy an Availability Group.
Customers are adopting SQL Server containers for many different purposes from local development to testing in DevOps pipelines to deployment with container orchestrators such as Kubernetes. SQL Server in containers are great because of their consistent, isolated and reliable behavior across environments, ease of use, and ease of starting and stopping. Customized content can be built on top of SQL Server containers, and run without being affected by the rest of the environment. This isolation makes SQL Server in containers ideal for test deployment scenarios as well as DevOps processes.
SQL Server 2019 on Linux and container images
SQL Server 2019 is now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Red Hat Certified Container Images and Ubuntu-based container images enabling you to take advantage of the latest SQL Server engine innovations such as new SQL Graph features, and Data Discovery and Classification. We are also making it possible to adopt SQL Server in containers with existing scenarios such as Replication and Distributed Transaction which are now part of SQL Server 2019 on Linux.
Red Hat Certified Container images
With SQL Server 2019 we continue to provide more platform choices with the addition of official SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Red Hat Certified Container Image. Previously, it was possible to build and run SQL Server in these containers, and now we are making it easier to get started by making it available on Microsoft Container Registry. You can run SQL Server container on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the all the existing SQL Server on Linux container functionality, or extend it by using this image as a base image. Either way, you can now use this image for a variety of use cases from development on local environment to deployment on OpenShift with support from Red Hat and Microsoft when 2019 is generally available.
Said Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat, “We’re pleased to extend our collaboration with Microsoft to bring SQL Server to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform as a production-ready certified container. With this addition to the Red Hat Container Catalog, our customers now have ready access to a mission-critical database on a trusted, reliable, and more secure operating system that’s optimized for container workloads.”
For more details on how to deploy SQL Server 2019 Red Hat Certified Container Images are available here. For access to the full list of Red Hat Certified Container images, visit the Red Hat Container Catalog.
SQL Server High Availability operator
SQL Server 2019 introduces the ability to deploy SQL Server containers with Always On Availability Groups on a Kubernetes cluster. The key functionalities for creation, management and health detection of the Availability Groups is encapsulated in the SQL Server HA container image (only Ubuntu images for CTP2.0). Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based images for Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift clusters will be made available in a subsequent CTP release of SQL Server 2019.
For more details on deployment, management and connecting to Availability Groups on an AKS cluster in Azure refer to the documentation.
Getting started with SQL Server in containers
- SQL Server 2019 CTP2.0 and 2017 images can be pulled from Microsoft Container Registry (MCR), our home for Microsoft-certified container images.
- For a complete list of SQL Server 2019 CTP2.0 improvements read What’s new in SQL Server documentation.
- For more details on how to deploy SQL Server 2019 in containers read Quickstart: Run SQL Server container images with Docker documentation.
- For more information on Red Hat Certified Container images, visit the Red Hat container catalog.
