Announcing vSAN Stretched Clusters for Azure VMware Solution

In today's world, where businesses are heavily reliant on technology, the need for continuous availability of critical applications and data has become increasingly important. Any disruption to IT operations can lead to significant financial and reputational losses for organizations. Therefore, it's essential to have a robust business continuity plan in place that ensures the seamless operation of critical applications and data, even in the event of a disaster.

Stretched Clusters for Availability and Protection

VMware vSAN Stretched Clusters address this need by enabling businesses to achieve high availability of their mission-critical applications and data by leveraging the capabilities of VMware vSAN to provide protection across multiple availability zones. This provides 99.99% uptime for applications with the highest availability requirements.

Today, AVS support for vSAN stretched clusters has moved from public preview, and is now generally available in West Europe, UK South, Germany West Central, and Australia East Azure regions.

A stretched cluster is configured by deploying an AVS private cloud across two availability zones (AZs) within the same region and placing a vSAN witness in a third AZ in that same region. The vSAN witness continuously monitors all hosts within the cluster to serve as a quorum in case of split-brain scenarios. The hosts within the private cloud are evenly deployed across regions and operate as a single entity, and storage policy-based synchronous replication ensures data is replicated across AZs delivering a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero. This means that if one AZ goes down due to a natural disaster or some other unexpected event, the other AZ can continue to operate and provide uninterrupted access to critical workloads.

Each AZ is separated into a preferred and secondary vSAN fault domain. By default, virtual machines (VMs) will use storage policies configured for dual site mirroring as well as local failures. VMs will reside in the preferred fault domain, and if there is a failure in that domain, vSAN will power off those VMs. vSphere HA will then power on those VMs in the secondary fault domain. Of course, administrators can configure and apply a variety of different storage policies to meet their needs. For more technical details around vSAN stretched clusters for AVS, including deployment, check out the Microsoft documentation, or refer to our additional content below.

The importance of stretched clusters to customers cannot be overstated. It provides peace of mind that their business will continue to operate even in the face of a disaster. This is especially critical for businesses in industries such as finance, healthcare, and government, where the availability of critical applications and data is paramount. It offers a compelling value proposition by delivering a highly efficient, easy-to-manage, solution for disaster recovery. As such, it should be considered an essential component of any business continuity plan.

Resources to Learn More

To learn more about stretched clusters for Azure VMware Solution: