By employing the services of a VMware Cloud Provider, the Microsoft Exchange infrastructure can be distributed across two or more sites. The SLA currently in place determines the degree of high availability and the placement of the Microsoft Exchange organization infrastructure.

In this solution architecture, the organization has one data center and has engaged with a VMware Cloud Provider to provide a second data center facility because the organization has determined site resiliency is required. Therefore, the Microsoft Exchange 2013 architecture is based on a multisite deployment with site resiliency. The organization has decided that a 24-hour recovery point objective is sufficient.

In addition to site resiliency, the organization wants the ability to power down a server for maintenance without affecting the user population’s messaging capabilities and without switching to a server at its passive copy data center.