SQL Server 2019 on RHEL8 container now available on Iron Bank-DoD’s Centralized Artifacts Repository

Nirali Shah

Today we announce the general availability of the SQL Server 2019 on RHEL8 container image available for consumption from the Department of Defense’s Centralized Artifacts Repository (DCAR), also known as Platform One’s Iron Bank.  

With this availability, SQL Server container images can now be used in highly-controlled environments, such as federal government, DoD, and Defense Industrial Base organizations, where the prerequisite to leverage any container image is that it must be hardened and accredited. Check out the container image on Iron Bank here. 

Iron Bank automates, secures, and accelerates the approval process of commercial and open source containers to be used within the DoD with DoD-wide reciprocity. Through the Iron Bank submission process, the SQL container image has undergone numerous hardening cycles against multiple DoD security benchmarks including those provided by the OpenSCAP, Twistlock and Anchore vulnerability and CVE scanners, which are the key requirements for an image to be enlisted on DoD’s Iron Bank.  

SQL Server is a modern data platform that meets the needs of today’s challenging world of massive data, a diverse set of data sources, and the need for near real-time application and query performance. The core SQL Server engine remains the same irrespective of the platform/OS/environment/container image that you choose to run SQL Server on. Additionally, the support policy guidelines, supported feature set, and release cadence will remain the same. The core difference of the hardened SQL container versus the traditional SQL container is the base OS RHEL 8.3 image used for the former image is a hardened RHEL 8 UBI image from Iron Bank, instead of the traditional UBI image. To learn more, see SQL Server on Linux. 

Follow these steps to get started using the SQL Server 2019 hardened container image: 

1. Log in to registry1.dso.mil  

• If you do not have an account, please register here 

2. Use docker/podman to download the image leveraging the following commands:  

• podman login 

• 1. Username: <your Registry1 username> 
  2. Password: <the CLI secret provided in the User Profile on Harbor>

• podman pull registry1.dso.mil/ironbank/microsoft/microsoft/microsoft-sql-server-2019-rhel8 

3. Lastly, use these commands to deploy the SQL container 

If you have any questions on your hardened SQL deployment, please reach out to us using one of the channels listed here. 

And, be sure to stay tuned for more Microsoft container releases to Iron Bank coming soon! 

Nirali Shah Program Manager, Microsoft Azure Government

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