The goal of this solution architecture document is to describe how to design a highly available and disaster recovery solution for virtualized SQL business crucial databases. This document provided a validated business continuity solution for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 using the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of AlwaysOn Availability Groups across a distributed architecture, combining both an on-premises and VMware Cloud Provider data center facility.

The AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature is the ideal solution for deploying highly available Microsoft SQL Server 2016 instances on a vSphere platform. AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide out-of-the-box protection for hardware, software, and data failure as well as additional capabilities to offload backups and read-only reporting queries to a secondary replica. With its non-shared disk architecture, AlwaysOn Availability Groups can be used safely with vSphere vMotion, DRS, and vSphere HA to reduce downtime and improve flexibility in your application architecture, while lowering costs and minimizing the need to perform an SQL failover. This solution can significantly reduce Microsoft SQL Server recovery time from hours or days to minutes or even seconds. Consider the following key architectural points when designing a solution:

With the combined power of the VMware Cloud Provider Program facility and virtualized Microsoft SQL Server 2016, an IT organization can demonstrate business-critical levels of performance and availability of database platforms, while accelerating the time to deployment and simplifying IT operations.