The Microsoft APS Appliance consists of the following domains

• Fabric Domain,
• PDW Workload Domain &
• HDI Workload Domain

The Fabric Domain consists of

• Physical Hosts
• Virtual machines needed to maintain infrastructure and workload VM configurations

The PDW Workload Domain consists of

• PDW Workload
  • SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition (PDW/APS build)
  • Control node and compute notes for PDW workload
• Storage
  • More files per filegroup
  • Leverages multiple spindles in parallel

The HDI Workload Domain consists of

• HDI Workload Details
• Windows HDI (Hortonworks HDP)
• Head/Security/Management nodes and Data nodes

Stay tuned for more information on Microsoft APS.