This document provides a validated business continuity solution, at a high level, for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 employing the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of DAGs across a distributed architecture. The overall aim of this solution architecture paper is to design a highly available and disaster recoverable solution for a virtualized Microsoft Exchange business critical environment spanning on-premises and VMware Cloud Provider data centers.

DAGs are the ideal solution for deploying a highly available Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 environment on a vSphere platform. DAGs provide out-of-the-box protection for hardware, software, and from data failure, as well as additional capabilities to reduce the requirement for backups. With its non-shared disk architecture, DAGs can be used safely with vSphere vMotion, DRS, and vSphere HA to reduce downtime and improve flexibility in the Microsoft Exchange architecture while lowering costs and minimizing the need to perform a Microsoft Exchange DAG failover. This solution can also reduce Microsoft Exchange mailbox server recovery time from hours or days to minutes or even seconds.

Consider the following key architectural points when designing a solution:

As shown in this solution architecture paper, with the combined power of the VMware Cloud Provider Program and virtualized Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, an IT organization can demonstrate business-critical levels of performance and availability of mailbox databases, while accelerating deployment time and simplifying IT operations. For more information, see Section 12, Reference Documents.