The main purpose of this project was to mainly to validate application and solution functionality, and to also validate that VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 provides support non-shared Microsoft Cluster Solutions (MSCS), specifically with Exchange DAG and SQL AAG and also include the performance, resiliency, and availability results are mixed with an out of the box approach. The figure below illustrates some of the performance results we were able to collect with the design and hardware utilized for this project. The design, deployment, and configuration of the environment, was considerably easier and faster to deploy since there no additional host utilities needed for the storage systems and components. During our testing and analysis, we discovered that performance for Exchange Server 2013 and SQL Server 2014 running on VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 was comparable to that of enterprise-class network-attached storage (NAS) and storage-area network (SAN) storage.

We used industry-standard test tools for both Exchange Server and SQL Server to generate simultaneous application load on the storage subsystem. This proof of concept and test consists on the deployment and configuration has all three applications deployed in the same VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 cluster, along with other management components such as Active Directory and DNS servers. In the paper we cover the configuration procedure for Exchange Server 2013 with Database Availability Groups (DAG), SQL Server 2014 with AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG) and Microsoft SharePoint 2013 on an eight-node VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 cluster. In this technical white paper we describe how concurrent Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server workloads are configured to deliver the performance levels they demand as aР’В Tier 1 applicationР’В on VMware Virtual SAN. As part of the effort to extend the awareness of VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 ability to host business critical applications we have put together a solution white paper which covers the design, and configuration of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, SQL Server 2014, and SharePoint 2013 and tested the solutionРІР‚в„ўs capabilities and supported features of these Microsoft business critical applications on Virtual SAN 6.0 as Proof of Concept.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 enables customers and partners to host Microsoft business critical applications such as Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc with consistent performance levels and constant availability.

Vmware 6.0 white paper