Replication for High Write SQL Server Environment

Hello everybody,
Long-time reader, first time writer ;-).
We have been analyzing our SQL environment with our vendor and wanted to reach out to the community to ask for advice.  Our main solution takes in large files daily and performs a series of logic that requires heavy writes to the disk upon import --
BCP or SSIS is not an option.  We have a bare metal SQL server that is configured which handles the import of the largest files in three hours.  We are looking to possibly use virtualization and  SQL 2014 to provide a better disaster recovery
option. 
We are working through a proof of concept with our hosting provider that has SQL running in a VMWare virtual environment using SAN disk as the main disk.  During our tests, the file that takes three hours to import takes around six hours in the virtual
environment.  Their engineers are looking at speeding up the SAN, but I would like to have an alternative.
Could I do something similar to the following:  have a bare metal server act as the main import server, and then replicate the data to servers that are virtualized?  I believe there is an always on feature with SQL 2014 which would provide automatic
switch over in case of failure.  How would you suggest I configure my environment to handle this?  Would it be make sense to have the bare metal server kick off a Tlog transfer after the file is imported to the virtualized environment?  If so,
how would that look?
Thank you very much, in advance, for you advice!!!!!

>have a bare metal server act as the main import server, and then replicate the data to servers that are virtualized?  I believe there is an always on feature with SQL 2014 which would provide automatic switch over in case of failure.
Yes.  That would be
AlwaysOn Availibility Groups. In an AG all the transaction log records written to the primary database's log file are copied to the secondary replicas as well.  The AG can't fail over automatically unless the secondary replica is synchronized. 
In your scenario it will probably take additional time to replicate the log records and apply them on the secondary, so you would not have automatic failover during that window. 
You could switch the replica from Sync to Async mode during the load window, and then back to Sync mode after.
>Would it be make sense to have the bare metal server kick off a Tlog transfer after the file is imported to the virtualized environment?
You could do this too, with Log Shipping.  The VM would be even farther behind the primary.
David
David http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dbrowne/

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    . : | : . : | : . tim

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