SRM User Guide: Site Recovery Manager Protection Groups

User Guides for VMware Solutions
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Public
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User Guides
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Documentation

Site Recovery Manager offers a grouping mechanism for related datastores and/or RDMs to be failed over together called a Protection Group. SRM protection groups can be one of three types:

  1. Datastore Groups. This is a related group of datastores or RDMs. Currently the FlashArray does not enforce that any particular volumes be failed over together. Therefore, datastores and RDMs are only required to be failed over together if there is one or more virtual machines that span multiple volumes (e.g. a VM that has a virtual disk on a VMFS and also uses an RDM-the volume underpinning the VMFS and the volume underpinning the RDM will be grouped by SRM).
  2. Individual VMs. This is not relevant when using FlashArray replication and is only for VMs protected by vSphere Replication. While it is supported to use vSphere Replication on virtual machines hosted on Pure Storage, SRM does not support protecting VMs in SRM with both options. So the best practice is to use either vSphere Replication or FlashArray replication, not both.
  3. Storage Policies. This is a grouping of replicated datastores via storage policies. This provides for the ability to move VMs between datastores without breaking SRM protection.

    Replicated volumes are added to a protection group via one (and only one) of the above mechanisms. In order for a volume to be added to a protection group, they must be SRM User Guide: Discovering Replicated Devices with the FlashArray SRA. Furthermore if they are to be protected by the stretched storage feature of SRM, they must also be protected with a storage policy.

    An SRM protection group is then included in one or more SRM recovery plans. A protection group defines what datastores/RDM are related, which then in turn dictates what virtual machines are related. All VMs that use a datastore or RDM in a protection group must be failed over together. A recovery plan then describes how a VM is to be recovered (should it be powered-in, what order should it power-on in, should a script be run, an IP be changed, etc). To have the ability to fail over the same VMs in different ways, add the protection group that protects that virtual machine to different recovery plans.