In this second use case, a vSAN two-node architecture is employed to provide redundancy, continuous availability, and disaster avoidance to Microsoft Tier 1 applications distributed across the on-premises environment and into the service provider’s data center.

Applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server provide redundancy and availability at the application layer. For instance, Microsoft SQL Server 2016 provides AlwaysOn technology that can be leveraged for high availability, disaster recovery, and fast application failover for maximum availability and data protection of business-critical database systems.

The AlwaysOn Availability Group feature was developed for applications that require high uptime, protection against failures within a single site, and adequate redundancy against failures across locations. This solution architecture helps protect application databases from planned and unplanned downtime, without the need for physical Raw Device Mapping (RDM) shared storage between nodes.

With this use case, the end customer has local access to the business SQL databases to provide responsive results to queries across multiple users within their office. In addition, this managed service offering provides a backup solution for the customer’s data from the replica databases located in the service provider's facility, offloading the burden of these tasks, as well as providing a secure, offsite location for its business critical data.

The following figure illustrates the high-level architecture this use case. Supported are stretched Tier 1 applications with local access to databases, and managed offsite backups.

 

For more information about configuring cross-site solutions with Microsoft Exchange and SQL, see the following VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit for Service Providers (vCAT-SP) publications: