Today’s dynamic organizations require a 100 percent reliable messaging infrastructure that lowers communication costs, increases productivity, simplifies administration, and decreases IT overhead. Environments that require continuous uptime and fast recovery from disaster scenarios are critical to meeting business requirements and service-level agreements (SLAs). The “being prepared” approach to providing application high availability is aimed not only at meeting customer SLAs, but also at reducing risk of revenue loss and maintaining compliance.

Planning for disasters and minimizing their impact is critical for enterprises and government agencies, and VMware Cloud Providers™ can assist in providing data center resources and services to leverage application-layer high availability solutions from Microsoft and other independent software vendors. Designing and deploying a messaging solution, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, in conjunction with a highly available hybrid cloud solution from a VMware Cloud Provider can help businesses mitigate these risks and still maintain control over 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. That is, 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 document describes the VMware Cloud Provider Program facility solution for supporting a geographically dispersed Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 environment protected by Database Availability Group (DAG) technology, which is the new building block for highly available and disaster recoverable messaging solutions.