Despite Microsoft’s earlier announcement of SQL Server Big Data Clusters (BDC) retirement in 2025, we continue receiving customers’ interests in running SQL BDC on our VMware Tanzu Platform. VMware, Microsoft and Dell EMC already released a joint solution to run SQL BDC on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid running in an on-prem environment last August, see my previous blog posts:
- Running SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters on Tanzu Kubernetes cluster in vSphere with Tanzu
- Announcing Microsoft SQL Server Big Data Clusters on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
Today we’ll continue to explore running SQL Server Big Data Clusters in a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster hosting on a VMware Cloud on AWS environment.
There are two options to deploy the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters for SQL BDC workloads running on VMware Cloud on AWS:
- Managed by Supervisor cluster (wcp) as the management cluster. The guest workload cluster is provisioned through Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service.
- Managed by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKGm). The guest workload cluster is provisioned through Tanzu CLI. This option is what we’ll talk about in this blog post.
Configure the Bootstrap machine on VMware Cloud on AWS
Before you deploy the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters on VMware Cloud on AWS, you need to configure a bootstrap machine that used to run the Tanzu CLI and deploy the SQL BDC workloads. Here’s an Ubuntu VM created as an example.
To access the bootstrap machine on VMware Cloud on AWS environment.
- You may access the bootstrap machine from the vCenter web console.
- Enable ssh to access the bootstrap machine from public network. You may refer to Prepare a vSphere Management as a Service Infrastructure for more details.
– Assign a public IP address in the VMware Cloud console for the bootstrap VM
– Create a NAT rules to associate the public IP with the Internal IP (IP address for the bootstrap machine)
– Modify Gateway Firewall rules to allow ssh connection to the bootstrap machine.
Deploy a management cluster with Tanzu CLI
Next, we’ll deploy the management cluster with Tanzu CLI. Check here to ensure you’ve installed all the necessary tools. Check out Firewall Rules for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on VMware Cloud on AWS article to configure the firewall rules required by TKG on VMware Cloud on AWS.
Run the following command to start the installation with Web UI.
|
1 |
tanzu mc create --ui |
Follow the steps described in Deploy Management Clusters with the Installer Interface documentation to deploy the management cluster. Here are some tips for management cluster deployment on VMware Cloud on AWS.
- Make sure you add the bootstrap public IP address to allow inbound connection to the vCenter in the Gateway Firewall rules.
- Make sure you assign a static IP address within your workload network for the TKG management cluster if you use kube-vip as the control plane endpoint provider.
Once the deployment is completed, run the following command to confirm.
Deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster
The Tanzu Kubernetes cluster can be provisioned through a configuration yaml files. A recommended way to generate the cluster yaml file is to modify from the management-cluster yaml file, which is under the ~/.config/tanzu/tkg/clusterconfigs directory. For more details, refer to Deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters to vSphere documentation. Here’s a sample Tanzu Kubernetes cluster created to host SQL BDC workloads.
Deploying SQL Server Big Data Clusters to the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters
Switch the kubectl context to the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster just deployed.
Make sure you have created a storage class for your BDC workload
vsan-default-sc.yaml
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 |
kind: StorageClass apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1 metadata: name: vsan-default-sc annotations: storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "false" provisioner: csi.vsphere.vmware.com parameters: storagePolicyName: "vSAN Default Storage Policy" |
Now you are ready to deploy SQL BDC to the TKG cluster on VMware Cloud on AWS. The BDC cluster is deployed with Azure Data CLI and the deployment profile can be generated in Azure Data Studio.
To deploy the BDC cluster, run the following command.
|
1 |
azdata bdc create --accept-eula yes --config-profile sqlbdc/script |
The Deployment will take a while depending on the network. Once the deployment is completed, verify the SQL BDC endpoints using the following command:
Conclusion
In this blog post, we demonstrated how to run SQL Server Big Data Clusters in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKGm) on VMware Cloud on AWS. The next blog post will continue to explore how to deploy SQL Server Big Data Clusters to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGs) that is managed by the Supervisor Cluster on VMware Cloud on AWS environment. Stay tuned!
