Questions on sharing SQL Server on VM and making it accessible to various other VM

Question

Is it possible to create a Azure VM (medium or large) running an instance of SQL Server. This machine would contain various databases (one of each client). These databases would then need to be accessible from different Azure VM's which would be hosting either a single website per vm or multiple website per vm each requiring to access different databases.

If it is possible:

1. How do the other Azure VMs connect to the relevant VM that's running SQL server and connect to a specific database?

2. What cost implication are there? We store a lot of data including documents as blobs.

Our software supports both storing the documents as blobs or as actual files. Should we consider storing the files directly onto the hard drive instead of storing them in the database? Would this improve performances when running on Azure VM and/or reduce cost?

1. What's the recommended solution for backup? I assume that Azure VM can go down, though less likely, just like any other machines. What the recommended solution to restore a back?

2. Same for SQL Server. What is the recommended solution to backup database. Since we'd be running a full version of SQL on a Azure VM, is the best solution to have a separate storage drive and backup databases on this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

1-)You can create a Virtual Network and after that, create your VM's and set them to use this virtual network. Doing that, your vm's would call the vm with your sql server.

2-) You'll be billed for network, storage and vm compute (including vm size). The best you can do is create a vm and test for a little (with this settings). So you'll know how much your are spending.

3-) When you create a vm, the vhd is stored in a storage account. There's a backup for that, but you can download the vhd and make a version of that on premises.

4-) My suggestion, attach a extra disk to your VM and use it to SQL Server Backup.