Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft SQL Server

As older versions of SQL Server reach end of life, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help you migrate to new hardware or the cloud of your choice with the latest version of the SQL Server database that is known and trusted. Your update should address the following challenges.

Disparate workloads. Traditional infrastructure and operations can limit application performance and business agility. Legacy operating systems can also introduce inconsistencies between on-premise and cloud deployments, making it difficult to meet security and compliance requirements.

High-performance needs. Speed and cost-savings rely on your server running at peak performance. This includes the ability to identify bottlenecks, fix issues, and simplify advanced tuning configurations. 

Security and availability. Even a minute of downtime can have a negative impact on your  business operations and outcomes, meaning you need SQL Server to be available without disruption. With various workloads, you also need a simple way to monitor security and make live kernel patches.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a performance-driven, cost-effective platform for Microsoft SQL Server that lets you quickly process large volumes of data and meet growing operational and analytical demands. It provides a scalable foundation and a consistent application experience, whether deployed across bare-metal, virtual machine, container, or hybrid cloud environments. Included analytics capabilities identify threats to security, performance, availability, and stability and provide remediation guidance to avoid issues, outages, and unplanned downtime. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is Microsoft’s reference platform for SQL Server on Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers record-breaking SQL Server performance.

Special migration offer: Red Hat Enterprise Linux now offers a specialized subscription for Microsoft SQL Server users, featuring enhanced terms on a 1-year subscription. Learn more about this limited-time promotion that provides an affordable option for CentOS Linux users to migrate their SQL Server workloads before the upcoming CentOS Linux 7 end-of-life on June 30, 2024.

Cloud-based environments where you can build once and deploy anywhere (on- or off-premises and across private and public clouds) minimize disruption to your business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables a common experience across platforms and is certified for SQL Server.

Red Hat’s hardware and cloud services partners offer SQL Server on Red Hat solutions with full support. Eliminate vendor-lock in by acquiring your database, OS and cloud provider from different vendors, increasing your buying power and giving you more flexible support options.

From decision support (TPC-H) to analytical workloads, SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux consistently delivers superior performance results in several industry-leading performance benchmarks and is optimized to take advantage of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) monitoring of SQL Server is available through a custom Grafana visualization dashboard, and integration of SQL Server with Red Hat Insights allows you to identify bottlenecks in SQL Server and fix identified issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers built-in security at the OS level so you don’t have to manage it separately for every workload, protecting against common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE). The Red Hat Enterprise Linux High-Availability Add-On offers a solid foundation for clustering and resource management and provides business-critical uptime, fast failover, and improved manageability, combined with high-availability features of SQL Server and backup tools to quickly recover in case of an unexpected failure. Your applications can get 24/7 availability by using automated database failover operations for SQL Server’s availability groups and failover cluster instances (FCI).

Optimize your most popular workloads at the time of deployment and simplify ongoing administration by automating workload-specific tasks. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s Microsoft SQL Server system role, you can install, configure and tune SQL Server in your Linux environment with recommended defaults. SQL Server Always On availability groups configuration, a process that can take several hours from the command line, is reduced to minutes using the SQL Server system role. New to Linux? Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console’s easy-to-use web interface simplifies complex activities for non-experienced administrators so they can perform tasks without command line knowledge.

Based on more than 25 years of customer support experience and learnings from over 1,000,000 support cases, Red Hat Insights strengthens SQL Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux by providing regularly updated predictive operating system analytics and SQL Server-specific rules to quickly identify optimizations and proactively prevent system risks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a variety of flexible subscription options with competitive pricing in leading cloud marketplaces. For on-premises hardware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux leads in all categories for lowest cost per transaction on SQL Server according to the TPC-H benchmark.