Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) provides the stable foundation for advanced workloads both on-premises and in public clouds such as Microsoft Azure. For Azure, Red Hat and Microsoft have been working together to provide the tools needed to deliver workloads faster, with less effort — backed by tightly integrated, enterprise-grade support. Many of today’s workloads require some form of enterprise database, and one of the most popular is Microsoft SQL Server. 

We’ve given several presentations covering how using RHEL as the operating system platform for SQL Server helps organizations to reduce costs, avoid reliance on a single vendor, and increase performance. The response from SQL Server DBAs has been impressive with nearly one third of those surveyed by Red Hat and Unisphere Research saying that they were running the database on Linux today, and RHEL being the most popular distribution for deployment.

Another critical requirement for many advanced workloads is an application framework that can deliver presentation logic for the information stored in enterprise databases hosted on RHEL. One of those frameworks is the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) which is celebrating 16 years as a Red Hat offering this year.

JBoss EAP introduced support for SQL Server on Linux a couple years ago. What you may not realize is that both SQL Server and JBoss EAP are available as ready-to-run images in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. What’s more, by bringing together these two solutions, you can build and deploy powerful enterprise applications while paying only for compute time when you need it.

In Azure, SQL Server is available pay-as-you-go from Microsoft pre-installed on your choice of either a standard RHEL image, or one that includes the RHEL High Availability Add-on. To help provide greater availability, you can use the built-in availability features of Azure, or utilize the Add-on to deploy SQL Server Always On availability groups to further reduce the possibility of downtime.

JBoss EAP is also available on RHEL in the Azure Marketplace. These prebuilt images make it easier to develop and deploy a powerful and familiar Jakarta EE runtime on Azure. For JBoss EAP you must bring your own Red Hat subscription, but for the RHEL operating system, you can choose between the option to bring-your-own-subscription or to pay-as-you-go.

The Azure Marketplace offer includes plan options for JBoss EAP on RHEL as standalone or clustered VMs/ There are three types of JBoss EAP configurations available in Azure:  

  1. A standalone server running on an Azure Virtual Machine

  2. A cluster of JBoss EAP servers running on Azure VMs on a private virtual network in a single subnet

  3. An autoscale cluster server running on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS)

Red Hat’s Yeray Borges Santana wrote a great article showing you how to use the Red Hat JBoss on RHEL offering in Azure to create a cluster of two JBoss EAP instances.

But what if you want to connect JBoss EAP with SQL Server on RHEL? Well we’ve got that covered as well. James Falkner created a video that shows how to deploy a complete JBoss EAP application using SQL Server, with everything running on RHEL. He demonstrates how to install JBoss in Azure, walks you through how to connect an instance to a SQL Server on RHEL image, and brings up the Coolstore demo application showing off a bunch of classic Red Hat swag in the process! Check his video demonstration here.


About the authors

Louis Imershein is a Product Manager at Red Hat focussed on Microsoft SQL Server and database workloads. He is responsible for working with Microsoft and Red Hat engineering to ensure that SQL Server performance, management, and security is optimized for Red Hat platforms. For more than 30 years, Louis has worked in technical support, engineering, software architecture, and product management on a wide range of OS, management, security, and storage software projects. Louis joined Red Hat as part of the acquisition of Permabit Technology Corporation, where he was VP of Product.

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James Falkner is a technology evangelist, teacher, learner, author and dedicated to open source and open computing. He works at Red Hat as a technical marketing director for Red Hat's cloud native application runtimes and loves learning from others, and occasionally teaching at conferences. He's been doing this for the last two decades, and is a Computer Engineering graduate of the University of Florida.

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