Availability zones and regions are used for different purposes.

Availability zones

An availability zone is the fault domain of the SDDC. Multiple availability zone scan provide continuous availability of an SDDC, minimize unavailability of services and improve SLAs.

Regions

Regions provide disaster recovery across different SDDC instances. This design uses two regions. Each region is a separate SDDC instance. The regions have a similar physical layer design and virtual infrastructure design but different naming. For information on exceptions to this design, see the Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery Design chapter.

Note:

This design leverages a single availability zone for a one region deployment, and a single availability zone in each region in the case of a two region deployment.

The design uses the following regions. The region identifier uses United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations(UN/LOCODE) along with a numeric instance ID.

Region

Region Identifier

Region-specific Domain Name

Region Description

A

SFO01

sfo01.rainpole.local

San Francisco, CA, USA based data center

B

LAX01

lax01.rainpole.local

Los Angeles, CA, USA based data center

Note:

Region Identifiers will vary based on the locations used in your deployment.

Table 1. Availability Zones and Regions Design Decisions

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

SDDC-PHY-001

Per region, a single availability zone that can support all SDDC management components is deployed.

A single availability zone can support all SDDC management and compute components for a region. You can later add another availability zone to extend and scale the management and compute capabilities of the SDDC.

Results in limited redundancy of the overall solution. The single availability zone can become a single point of failure and prevent high-availability design solutions.

SDDC-PHY-002

Use two regions.

Supports the technical requirement of multi-region failover capability as outlined in the design objectives.

Having multiple regions will require an increased solution footprint and associated costs.