Today’s dynamic business environment requires continuous uptime and fast recovery from disaster scenarios to meet business requirements and service level agreements (SLAs), with one of the most important requirements being availability of databases. The “being prepared” approach to providing application high availability is aimed at meeting customer agreed to SLAs, while reducing risk of revenue losses and maintaining compliance.

Planning for disasters and minimizing their impact is critical for all enterprises and government agencies. VMware Cloud Providers™ can assist in providing data center resources and services to leverage application layer high availability solutions for Microsoft and other software vendors. Designing and deploying a database solution such as Microsoft SQL Server 2016, in conjunction with a highly available hybrid cloud solution from a VMware Cloud Provider, can help businesses mitigate risks and still control deployment and operational costs.

Many different approaches to architecting a VMware based hybrid cloud exist, depending on the specific use case requirements and technologies employed. However, the end goal is always the same. A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. This vCloud Architecture Toolkit for Service Providers (vCAT-SP) solution architecture document describes a VMware Cloud Provider Program solution for supporting a geographically dispersed SQL Server 2016 environment protected by Microsoft’s AlwaysOn technology.