A protection group protects a set of VMs or physical devices. You can create the following protection groups based on the disaster recovery method:
Storage replication protection group—You assign VMs attached to the same storage pool (a LUN in a storage array) to a protection group based on a protection policy. It replicates the VM data stored on a LUN in the local storage array to a LUN in a remote storage array through array-based replication when failure occurs.
When you create a protection group, you must associate a protected site and recovery site with the protection group, specify the host pools of the sites, and configure resource mapping relations.
Resource mapping relations associate the resources used by the protected VMs in the protected site with the sources in the recovery site. When VMs are recovered in the recovery site, the resources they use are automatically replaced with the resources in the recovery site. You can create vSwitch mappings, port profile mappings, and storage mappings. For CVM to replicate data between two LUNs, specify them in a storage mapping.
Disk backup protection group—You assign VMs or production nodes installed with disaster recovery client software to a protection group to protect them based on a disaster recovery policy. Disk backup protection groups can be of the standalone, dual-node, or cluster type. VMs or production nodes in a standalone protection group run independently. VMs or production nodes in a dual-node or cluster protection group must have shared storage to store the data that can be accessed by all VMs or production nodes in the group. A disk backup protection group supports the following scenarios:
Homogeneous scenario—CAS CVM management platforms with the same version run in the protected and recovery sites to protect the VMs on the CVM platform. In a homogeneous scenario, you must specify the protected site and recovery site, specify the VMs installed with disaster recovery client software in the protected site as the protected objects, select a disaster recovery policy, and then configure network resource mapping relations between these sites.
Heterogeneous scenario—CAS CVM protects the VMs on a CVM platform with a lower version or VMs or physical devices on other platforms, and recovers them on a CAS CVM platform with a higher version. In a heterogeneous scenario, you use a local site as the recovery site, specify the VMs or production nodes installed with disaster recovery client software as the protected objects, select a disaster recovery policy, and then configure production node network resources in the recovery site.
Make sure the VMs or production nodes have disaster recovery client software installed before adding them to a disk backup protection group.
VMs in a storage replication protection group do not support the Storage and Host and Storage migration types.
Before cloning or converting a VM installed with the disaster recovery client to a template, delete file AentSystenmInfo.ini in the installation path of the disaster recovery client.