With Microsoft’s recent release of the first public preview of MS SQL Server running on Linux, I wondered what they would do for high availability. Knowing how tightly coupled AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Clustering is to the Windows operating system I was pretty certain they would not be options and I was correct.
Well, the people over at LinuxClustering.Net answered my question on how to provide high availability failover clusters for MS SQL Server v.Next on Linux with this great Step by Step article.
Not only that, they did it all in Azure which we know can be tricky given some of the network limitations.
I’d be curious to know if you are excited about SQL Server on Linux or if you think it is just a little science experiment. If you are excited, what does SQL Server on Linux bring to the table that open source databases don’t? If you like SQL Server that much why not just run it on Windows?
I’m not being facetious here, I honestly want to know what excites you about SQL Server on Linux. I’m looking forward to your comments.
Clustering For Mere Mortals 
I am excited about SQL Server on Linux and I’ve been using it while it was in private beta. My organization is 50% Windows and 50% Linux. For me, the main use case is Docker. We have lots of small databases for various apps, mostly vendor apps. The vendor apps generally make an assumption that they can have the SA role, especially during installs or upgrades. We usually work around this by using a SQL alias, doing the install/upgrade in a sandbox environment, and then moving the databases to a consolidated environment. SQL Server in a Docker container is interesting because it will allow us to give an application a full SQL Server instance without paying the penalty of provisioning a full VM. Docker will also let us spin up/down new instances much quicker and we are looking at ways to provide “self-service” and automation for the teams at my organization who need databases.
In regards to Linux vs Windows, I fully expect most of our SQL Server databases to remain on Windows. However, Docker on Linux is much more mature and it provides a more light weight platform. I think this may spur some interest from some of our developers who are currently using MySQL/Postgres/Oracle to try SQL Server.
Thanks for that insight!