Businesses of all sizes are demanding improved levels of availability for virtualized business critical applications to meet service needs. IT organizations are upgrading or migrating to Microsoft Tier 1 applications that can leverage application availability across multiple physical data centers. One such offering from Microsoft is SQL Server 2016 with its AlwaysOn feature that supports for high availability and disaster recovery solutions. The Microsoft SQL Server 2016 AlwaysOn technology is an integrated, flexible, and cost-efficient solution that can provide redundancy within and across data centers. In addition, AlwaysOn provides fast application failover for maximum availability, and data protection of business critical applications. The migration to Microsoft SQL Server 2016 can also replace older physical infrastructures, which are difficult to manage and expensive to support.

VMware Cloud Providers who offer consumers hybrid cloud-based virtualized on-premises and off-premises database solutions, like SQL Server, are supporting the rapidly transforming way organizations deploy and manage their IT assets and resources. Application-based hybrid cloud service offerings can provide both consumer and provider with a flexible solution that provides significant advantages in cost, efficiency, and availability. With fewer servers consuming less space, power, cooling, and physical facilities, IT organizations can realize significant capital and operational expense savings by moving the IT infrastructure that provides high availability to Tier 1 applications to a VMware Cloud Provider Program data center.

This vCAT-SP solution architecture focuses on deploying Microsoft SQL Server 2016, taking advantage of its AlwaysOn functionality to provide a hybrid cloud approach to application availability with a VMware Cloud Provider.