Preparing on-premises machines for Azure Arc enabled SQL Server

This book is designed to be a blend of knowledge and being hands-on, that is, you will see a lot of implementation steps and example deployments. In order to prepare for that, please follow the steps from Chapter 1, Azure Arc Overview, to prepare your Azure accounts in advance.

In this section, we'll create the required Azure infrastructure to simulate the on-prem (on-premises) environments for Azure Arc enabled SQL servers. If you have an on-prem infrastructure, you may use that as well, rather than hosting everything in Azure.

Creating a SQL Server VM in Hyper-V

We will be creating a virtual machine on the Hyper-V server created in Chapter 1, Azure Arc Overview. This VM will be used later in this chapter to onboard to Azure Arc.

For this demonstration, we will create a single VM on a Hyper-V host running the Windows OS and SQL Server 2019 on top of it. Deploying a nested VM in the Hyper-V server...