Posted on September 14, 2021

First step login into the Azure portal and find SQL Managed Instance and click create. Yes you can find these tutorials all online but this is my thinking and opinions on some key areas.

Everything feels as you would expect within the portal, set the basic settings like the name, region and admin account details.

Drill into the compute / storage section here is where you define the service tier. Things can get very expensive here so make sure you set what you really need, below I am being sensible.

Just to show you a cost of extreme nature, I select Business Critical with 80 vcores and 1 TB storage

The biggest difference between the two types (General Purpose and Business Critical) comes down to I/O performance. Where:

Single GP databases: Is capable of 4.5 MB/s per vCore (max 50 MB/s)

Single BC databases: Is capable of 12 MB/s per vCore (max 96 MB/s)

Most likely when looking at costs, you will likely be leveraging Azure Hybrid Benefit for some handy savings, such as the below – approx 50% savings.

What you want to do in the future dictates your networking setup. This requires planning and support from within your organisation. SQL MI needs a dedicated subnet and the IP address range is dictated by future actions. For example, if you know you will want to scale service tiers, storage size – scale up or down these require Ips, then once you add up the addresses you decide on a subnet mask. Plan now and you won’t regret, see this for more details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/managed-instance/vnet-subnet-determine-size

How you have designed your Azure networking dictates how you connect to the instance, if everything that should connect within the same VNET then great, that is simple, otherwise things like vnet peering might be needed.

99% of the times you will never directly connect via the internet, you just wouldn’t. Keep everything locked down and connected internally. If you need to use services like Power Apps then consider the data gateway.

The rest below is self-explanatory – I do not enable Geo-replication (but we will another time)

A cool thing now is that you have the ability to select a maintenance window as shown below, You can use the default or switch to weekends.

Sit back and relax, the deployment can take some time:

Then once it has been deployed you can then connect.

If you are within an Enterprise setup don’t forget to setup Azure Directory Admin for the instance too.