SQL Server on Virtual Machines Alternatives (September 2025)

Build Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) and save up to 80 percent with Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server.

Build apps faster and scale automatically on Azure SQL Database, the intelligent, fully managed relational cloud database.

For assessment and data migration software, choose Azure Database Migration Service for moving on-premises SQL Server and Oracle databases to the cloud.

Azure Virtual Desktop combines the scale, security, and cost benefits of Azure and Microsoft 365 for a secure remote desktop from virtually anywhere.

Make autoscaling your VMs easier with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Run thousands of virtual machines in minutes based on customizable metrics.

Invent with purpose, realize cost savings, and make your organization more efficient with Microsoft Azure’s open and flexible cloud computing platform.

Try Azure Database for PostgreSQL to build reliable and intelligent applications for your organization. Explore open-source PostgreSQL database.

Learn about high-performance block storage for Azure Virtual Machines. Explore cost-effective options with cloud Ultra, SSD, and HDD disks.

Built on the proven analytical engine in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services delivers enterprise-grade data modeling in the cloud.

Use the Azure Migrate hub of cloud migration tools and services to assess your current workloads and plan and implement your migration to Azure.

Run complex, performance-intensive and latency-sensitive applications in the cloud—without any code change.

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL and relational database for modern app development. Start building applications with a free trial.

Enjoy fast, private cloud connections—including MPLS VPN connections—between Azure and on-premises datacenters with Azure ExpressRoute.

Try Azure File Storage for managed file shares that use standard SMB 3.0 protocol. Share data with on-premises and cloud servers, integrate with apps, and more.

Learn about Azure Virtual Network. Create your own private network in the cloud. View features and build a hybrid IT infrastructure you can control.

Azure Archive Storage provides a low cost means of delivering durable, highly available, secure cloud storage and data management for rarely accessed data.

Azure Lab Services provides secure, sharable virtual labs in the cloud with on-demand or scheduled access to preconfigured virtual machines.

Use Azure Arc solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud management to run Azure services anywhere. Accelerate innovation with Azure Arc–enabled data services.

Learn about Azure Automation, a cloud automation service for process automating those long-running, error-prone, frequently repeated tasks with Windows PowerShell.

At Build, we announced the latest update of Azure IoT Remote Monitoring, a solution accelerator that is fully operational right out of the box.

Run your production workloads on hybrid, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with Azure-Arc enabled Azure Stack HCI. Modernize your edge computing environments.

Gain end-to-end observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network both on cloud and hybrid environments with Azure Monitor.

Run application containers in the cloud with a single command. Get started in seconds and lower your infrastructure costs with per-second billing.

Manage billions of IoT devices with Azure IoT Hub, a cloud platform that lets you easily connect, monitor, provision, and configure IoT devices.

Get an overview Azure managed disks, which handle the storage accounts for you when you're using virtual machines.

Get started with Microsoft SQL Server downloads. Choose a SQL Server trial, edition, tool, or connector that best meets your data and workload needs.

Learn how Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery integrate to provide an end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution with unlimited scale.

Protect against ransomware with a centralized cloud backup service and solution.

Discover Azure Data Factory, the easiest cloud-based hybrid data integration service and solution at an enterprise scale. Build data factories without the need to code.

Migrate and build apps. Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for creating web applications. The app service offers a range of app development plans and services.

Azure Blob storage provides scalable, cost-efficient object storage in the cloud. Store and access unstructured data for your most demanding workloads.

Manage, deploy, and patch your domain controllers in the cloud with Microsoft Entra Domain Services (formerly Azure Active Directory Domain Services).

Backblaze B2 provides unlimited data storage in the cloud at 1/5th the cost of Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise SQL data warehousing and big data analytics services.

Learn about Azure Batch, a Microsoft cloud computing service for running large-scale parallel and batch compute jobs.

Drive faster, more reliable online transaction processing (OLTP) for less with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. The high-performance SQL database server uses a relational model to power transaction-based application on premise or in the cloud.

Learn about how Azure confidential computing protects data in use and learn ways to build confidential workloads in the cloud.

Get HDInsight, an open-source analytics service that runs Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and more. Integrate HDInsight with big data processing by Azure for even more insights.

Learn about Azure Cloud Services, which helps you deploy and scale powerful cloud applications and APIs. Supports Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, .NET, and more.

Learn how Azure Stack brings the agility of cloud computing to your on-premises environment.

Reduce costs using cost optimization and analysis through Microsoft Cost Management. Increase transparency, accuracy, and efficiency in cost management.

Azure API Apps give you the tools to develop, host, secure, and share REST APIs in your organization or with the world.

Overview of how to deploy SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances).

Azure API Management offers a scalable, multi-cloud API management platform for securing, publishing, and analyzing APIs.

Build, manage, and deliver solutions through the Azure Marketplace or Service Catalog with Azure Managed Applications.

MariaDB provides enterprise open source database and cloud managed database services to support scalability, mission-critical deployments, and more.

Ensure fast, reliable databases with SQL Diagnostic Manager—identify, fix, and prevent issues instantly, saving time and optimizing admin efficiency.

IBM Db2 is the database to run your mission-critical workloads. Power low-latency transactions and real-time analytics across any cloud, hybrid or on-prem.

With Azure SignalR Service, adding real-time communications to your web application is as simple as provisioning a service.

Get best-in-class Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to ensure application availability and fast recovery. Protect your data with Azure Site Recovery.

SQL Server Monitor and Health Analysis tool with advance backup option , scripting automation, Index Fragmentation analysis

Store data of any size, shape, and speed with Azure Data Lake. Power your big data analytics, develop massively parallel programs, and scale with future growth.

Create event-driven, scalable serverless applications in .NET, Node.js, Python, Java, or PowerShell with the Azure Functions app— a serverless computing service.

Download and install the Azure SDKs and Azure PowerShell and command-line tools for management and deployment.

10 of Redgate's market-leading tools for database development and administration at a discounted rate - try them free for 14 days

Connect business offices, retail locations, and sites securely with Virtual WAN, a unified wide-area network portal powered by Azure and the Microsoft global network.

Percona Server for MySQL is a free, fully compatible, open source MySQL Server alternative that offers breakthrough performance and scalability. Learn more!

Reach wider audiences on the devices they use with cloud video streaming, encoding, and indexing services from Azure Media Services.

View pricing details for Azure DNS. Host your domain in Azure for outstanding performance and availability.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service with hardened security and fast delivery. Deploy and manage containerized applications with AKS.

Get more value from your enterprise data assets with Azure Data Catalog. Spend less time looking for data and more time getting value from it. Get started today.

Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is a complete application delivery and VDI solution empowering the creation of digital workspaces! Read more.

Learn about Azure Red Hat OpenShift, an OpenShift service managed by Microsoft and Red Hat with Kubernetes PaaS at its core. Discover a turnkey container platform.

Secure your network and devices, manage device and application updates, and receive long-term OS support with Windows 10 IoT Core Services.

Azure Table storage provides a NoSQL key-value store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets. Get started today.

Bring your own containers and deploy to App Service as a web app running on Linux in seconds using Web App for Containers feature of Azure App Service.

NoSQL Database can be run in the cloud or on-premises for applications that require either flexible data models, workloads, demanding predictable, lighting fast access to data or easy to use APIs.

Azure Advisor is a recommendation service that analyzes your configurations and usage, then helps you follow Azure best practices to optimize your deployments.

Get 10 free parallel jobs for cloud-based CI/CD pipelines for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Automate builds and easily deploy to any cloud with Azure Pipelines.

Build, manage, and monitor all your apps in Microsoft Azure Portal. A single, unified hub built for you, your team, and your projects.

BDRSuite provides the simplest yet efficient Backup and Recovery solution for VMware, Hyper-V, and Physical Servers, for all types of businesses.

Get started today with Azure Premium Storage for low latency and high throughput storage suitable for I/O intensive applications.

Easily develop and run massively parallel data transformation and processing programs in U-SQL, R, Python, and .NET over petabytes of data.

Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) offers high performance, elastic & secure virtual cloud servers with various instance types at cost-effective prices for all your cloud hosting needs.

Provides an overview of Remote Desktop Services.

Learn how Azure App Service helps you develop and host web applications.

Driven by the need for greater productivity, lower costs, and more recently being able to scale a remote workforce, organizations around the world are moving their IT workloads to the cloud. Planning a move to the cloud requires upfront pre-migration planning; this is as important as the implementation itself. But it can be daunting to know where to start or what needs to be in place for a successful migration. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) can help provide insight into your level of readiness and what you can do to improve it.

Store images for all types of container deployments and OCI artifacts, using Azure Container Registry.

Cloud and on-premises resources monitoring and automation built with MSPs, CSPs and DevOps in mind. Get advanced insight into Microsoft Azure and AWS system performance, auto-scale resources, execute self-healing actions. Try it for free.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a fully managed, open-source cloud database service that allows you to easily operate and scale your relational database of choice, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MySQL.

Learn about Azure Event Hubs, a managed service that can ingest and process massive data streams from websites, apps, or devices.

QuickBooks, Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Office 365, Azure, SharePoint & Exchange Hosting from Apps4Rent. Best Prices.

Make Big Data your biggest ally with SAP IQ software, our extreme-scale relational database management system (RDBMS).

A browser-based shell experience in the cloud that’s maintained by Microsoft to manage Azure resources with popular command-line tools and programming languages

Amazon Aurora is a global-scale relational database service built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

The broadest selection of relational and NoSQL purpose-built databases, fully managed, high performance, and ready to scale.

InfoScale 8.0.2   Veritas InfoScale is a software-defined infrastructure solution that is integrated directly with applications to provide high availability and disaster recovery for critical business services, including databases, customer applications and multitiered business services. It delivers a common availability platform that supports physical, virtual, and all major public cloud environments, providing the flexibility to optimize availability for any platform based on business requirements.   To learn more about InfoScale and what it can do for you, please visit our InfoScale product page: https://www.veritas.com/availability/infoscale   What’s new in InfoScale 8.0.2   With this release, InfoScale expands on Veritas’ decades-long position as the leader in this space. InfoScale 8.0.2 introduces significant security and usability improvements while simultaneously expanding our platform support to include the latest and most widely adopted hyper-converged and multi-cloud environments.    Expanded cloud support – Oracle Cloud, AWS VMC, Google Cloud GCVE, AWS MultAttach, Azure Shared Disk, Azure Managed Identity, better support for VVR stretch clusters Enhanced security – Secure Boot support (Linux), Windows Volume Encryption, SecureFS ransomware protection, support for the latest updates to OS, database and virtualization platforms Improved ease of use – simplified deployment using Ansible templates and native CPI installers, VIOM improvements for ransomware protection and VVR, Windows wizards for shared-storage configuration in cloud Core functionality enhancements – Support S3 target, OpenStack Manila and Cinder support, improved DMP performance (FPIN), NVMe fencing (AFA), FSS resync improvements   See Release Notes for details

Secure your infrastructure and empower your workforce. The SonicWall SMA solution provides secure remote access to corporate resources hosted across on-prem, cloud and hybrid datacenters.

PHP cloud server control panel that support Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS, Vultr, Azure and other custom VPS. Git deployment webhook and easiest control panel to manage Laravel, Cake, Symphony or WordPress.

Rely on mobile backend as a service (mbaas) from Azure to reduce time to market with cloud services, tools, and DevOps.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is a highly resilient, secure cloud service that provides database discovery, schema conversion, data migration, and ongoing replication to and from a wide range of databases and analytics systems.

CloudEndure, an AWS Company, provides disaster recovery and cloud migration to AWS from any physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure.

Fully managed Windows file system for business applications.

Keep connected with Azure Service Bus, a cloud messaging system for connecting apps and devices across public and private clouds.

The XtremeLabs Marketplace is now open! Purchase labs for Microsoft and other technology partners, instructor-led training courses, and integrated course materials. XtremeLabs builds award-winning products for popular technologies including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, CompTIA, VMware, cybersecurity, and many others.

Vultr Global Cloud Hosting - Brilliantly Fast SSD VPS Cloud Servers. 100% KVM Virtualization

Confluent makes it easy to connect your apps, data systems, and entire business with secure, scalable, fully managed Kafka and real-time data streaming, processing, and analytics.

Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, serverless time series database service for Internet of Things (IoT) and operational applications that helps you store and analyze time series data.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a feature that ensures the right number of EC2 instances are available for an application's load, maintaining availability by automatically adding or removing EC2 instances. To use Auto Scaling, in the EC2 Console, create a launch template, then create an Auto Scaling Group (ASG).