The following figure illustrates a logical view of the disaster recovery setup using PowerFlex asynchronous replication feature.

Figure 3.   Logical architecture of PowerFlex asynchronous replication

In a PowerFlex HCI-based system, both the SDC and the SDS components (and optionally, the MDM component) are installed on every node in the cluster, creating hyperconverged (HCI) nodes that handle both application compute and storage needs . The SDS aggregates and serves raw local storage in each node and shares that storage as a part of the PowerFlex cluster. A single protection domain is carved out of the drives on these SDS systems. A single storage pool is configured, and multiple volumes are carved out from the Protection Domain to meet the SQL Server FCI disk groups. These volumes are mapped to the HCI nodes and later mapped to the Windows virtual machine as RDMs.

Note: The solution is demonstrated in engineering lab using HCI PowerFlex deployment model with VMware vSphere environment, however, the PowerFlex replication and snapshot strategy and the best practices demonstrated in this paper are applicable for both virtualized and bare metal configurations and for both HCI and two-Layer deployments.