Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore: VMware vSphere Best Practices > Snapshots and recoveries
To automate and simplify protecting data, PowerStore uses protection policies. These policies are a set of snapshot and replication rules that are applied to a volume or group of volumes. Snapshot policies can also be applied to file systems and starting with PowerStoreOS 3.0, replication policies can be assigned to NAS servers. Protection policies help protect data, set retention policies, and help guarantee recovery point objectives (RPOs) for an organization.
Also, protection policies can be applied to individual volumes or to volume groups. When a protection policy is applied to a volume group, it allows multiple volumes to have snapshots taken, to be replicated, or to be recovered, simultaneously. This ability allows protecting complex applications that are interdependent and span across multiple volumes.
You can take vVol snapshots from either the PowerStore Manager or the vCenter client, but they are inherently managed by vCenter. When you create virtual machine snapshots from the vCenter client, the best practice is to disable the option for virtual machine memory which may increase snapshot time significantly.