Part-3: Create Protection Policies

In the previous posts we went through deploying Prism Central in Main site and DR site, Enable Leap and Configure Availability Zones,

Part-1: Prism Central One-Click Deployment (Click Here)
Part-2: Enabling Leap and Configure Availability Zones (Click Here)

In this post we will go through Creating and configuring Protection Policies,

From Prism Central on the Main Site, on the left corner, click on Entities menu > Policies > Protection Policies

Click on Create Protection Policies

Give a name to the Protection Policy, Primary Location will be selected as your Main Site "Local AZ", 

• Select your Recovery Location, 
• Select your Target Cluster to which to replicate the snapshots, which actually will be your DR Site,
• Select Recovery Point Objective which specify the frequency at which you want snapshots to be taken
• Select Retention Policy:

• Linear: Implements a simple, linear retention scheme at both local and remote sites. If you set the retention number for a given site to n, the n most recent snapshots are retained at that site. For example, if the RPO is one hour and the retention number for the local site is 48, the 48 most recent snapshots are retained at any given time.

• Roll-up: Rolls up the oldest snapshots for the specified RPO interval into a single snapshot when the next higher interval is reached, all the way up to the retention period specified for a site. For example, if you select roll-up retention, set the RPO to one hour, and set the retention time at a site to one year, the twenty four oldest hourly backups at that site are rolled up into a single daily backup at the completion of every 24 hours, the seven oldest daily backups are rolled up into a single weekly backup at the completion of every week, the four oldest weekly backups are rolled up into a single backup at the completion of every month, and the twelve oldest monthly backups are rolled up into a single backup at the completion of every year. At the end of one year, that site has 24 of the most recent hourly backups, seven of the most recent daily backups, four of the most recent weekly backups, twelve of the most recent monthly backups, and one yearly backup. The snapshots that are used to create a rolled-up snapshot are discarded.

Then set the desired Remote and Local retention which is the number of snapshots that will retain in each site.

If you want to take application consistent snapshots, select Take App-Consistent Recovery Point,

For application consistent snapshots, NGT must be installed on VMs running on AHV.

To Protect group of VM's we need to Add Categories, but before doing this we need to select our VM's that will be members of these categories

To setup Categories, From Prism Central on the left corner, click on Entities menu > Virtual Infrastructure > Categories, by default you can see some default categories which you can use or you can create your own New Categories, click on New Categories

Give a Name and a Value to your category, this will be the name that will be used while creating the Protection Policy, 

After Creating Categories we need to add VM's as members on each category, to do this go to Entities menu > Virtual Infrastructure > VMs

Select the VM's you want to be added to the category, click on Actions > Manage Categories

Search your desired category and click on it then click Save,

Now after we configured our Categories and have VM's added to each category, lets go back to Creating Protection Policy wizard to continue adding categories to the Protection Policy,

Select the category and click Save,

Your Protection Policies will be listed here and at any point you can Update, Clone or delete any created Protection policy by selecting the policy and click on actions and select your required action,

If you would like to add Single VM (Without being member of any Category) then you will need to go to Entities menu > Virtual Infrastructure > VMs > List then Select your VM from the list, and from Actions click on "Protect"

After you click on "Protect" you will have the option to select which Protection Policy you want to add your Single VM to

In the next posts we will go through Create and configuring Recovery Plans then we will be able to conduct Test Failover, Planned Failover (Migration), Un-Planned Failover (Recover from a Disaster): 

Part-4: Create, Configure and Validate Recovery Plans (Click Here)