A multi-available architecture offers additional protection above a standard or consolidated architecture. Each availability zone is isolated from other availability zones to prevent a data center or site failure, and to prevent the propagation of a failure across zones.
Figure 22. Multi-Available Zone architecture
The nodes supporting the underlying VxRail cluster are installed and cabled in racks in two isolated zones, and a single VxRail stretched cluster is configured with the nodes in the two zones. The vSAN datastore in this architecture is stretched across both zones with I/O synchronized across sites to ensure no data loss in the event of an outage.
The network between the two zones must offer low latency (less than 5 ms) and sufficient bandwidth (minimum 10 Gbps) between the zones. Therefore, availability zones can protect against a wide scale outage in a metro area, or more simply, two safety or fire sectors in the same large-scale data center.