Because businesses of all sizes are demanding improved high availability for virtualized business critical applications to meet SLAs, organizations are upgrading or migrating to Microsoft tier 1 applications that can leverage application availability across multiple data centers. One such offering is Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, which provides DAG features that can be leveraged for high availability and disaster recovery. Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 DAG technology is an integrated, flexible, and cost-efficient solution that can provide redundancy within and across data centers. In addition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 DAG solutions provide fast application failover for maximum availability and data protection of business-critical messaging systems. The migration to Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 can also replace older physical infrastructures, which are difficult to manage and expensive to support.

VMware Cloud Providers that take advantage of these application-layer high availability solutions to offer cloud consumers hybrid cloud-based virtualized on-premises and off-premises solutions are supporting the rapidly changing way that organizations deploy and manage their IT assets and resources. VMware Cloud Providers offer IT organizations a single flexible and scalable platform to manage and reduce system complexity and IT operational overhead. By providing this, application-based hybrid cloud service offerings give both consumers and providers a flexible solution with significant advantages in cost, efficiency, and availability. In addition, with fewer servers consuming less space, power, and cooling, IT organizations can gain significant capital and operational expense savings by moving from an IT infrastructure that provides high availability to tier 1 applications to a VMware Cloud Provider data center.

This vCAT-SP solution architecture focuses on deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and taking advantage of its DAG functionality to provide a hybrid cloud approach to application availability with a VMware Cloud Provider. It also focuses on helping IT organizations achieve business continuity objectives at a lower risk and cost.