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We are planning to migrate our on-premise SharePoint 2013 installation to Azure. We are using Azure as Infrastructure as a Service. So we will have our own servers.

I would like to know if its possible to use On Premise SQL-Server databases on Azure. To save cost of servers and sql licenses we would like to keep SQL Server databases on premise and only migrate the front end SP servers to Azure.

Keeping in mind that we have high bandwidth connectivity between Azure and our data centers.

My questions are:

  1. Is it doable?
  2. Is it recommended?
  3. If tomorrow we would like to move sql servers as well what is the effort needed.

Thanks

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  1. Microsoft calls it Stretched Farm if you host the server components of a SharePoint-Farm in different Datacenters. Yes, it is doable but..
  2. ... it is not really recommended. The requirements to be supported mostly cannot be met (<1ms latency, 1Gbit bandwidth). You should always host SQL-Server and SharePoint servers as close together as possible.
  3. Moving the databases to an Azure VM doesn't really differ moving to another OnPremises server. The process was already described in this answer. You cannot move to a Azure SQL Database . If Azure SQL Database Managed Instance will be supported cannot be said yet, as it's still in preview.
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  • <1ms latency seems impossible to achieve. However ours is largely a static website. Some contents are updated every few days. Hope we can achieve better performance using IIS output caching even if the database latency exists
    – Saqib Vaid
    Commented May 15, 2018 at 13:26
  • My recommendation: Don't do that! SharePoint and SQL-Server communicate all the time, even if content is mostly static. If you experience timeouts, SharePoint will give confusing errors which are very hard to troubleshoot.
    – MHeld
    Commented May 15, 2018 at 14:23
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    This is well outside of the support boundaries. As @MHeld indicates, it is fully unsupported, regardless of how often or not you update your content. There is a significant amount of processing being done via constantly running timer jobs, even on a farm that isn't in use.
    – user6024
    Commented May 15, 2018 at 15:05

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