Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore: VMware vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Clusters > Volume groups and protection policies
A volume group is a logical container for a group of block volumes and provides a single point of management for multiple storage resources that work together as a unit. For example, use volume groups to monitor metrics. This would be a useful application for vSphere with Tanzu.
Volume groups can also be used to consistently apply snapshot and replication data protection policies across all volumes in the volume group. These features are beneficial for traditional storage hosts and application types. However, many of the objects introduced in vSphere with Tanzu such as Supervisor Cluster Control Plane Nodes, Pods, and Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters cannot be directly managed from the vSphere UI. In addition, some of these objects are not visible as traditional storage object types within PowerStore Manager and they do not contain stateful user or application data. For these vSphere with Tanzu object types, it is not practical to use traditional PowerStore Manager snapshot and asynchronous or synchronous replication for data protection. However, one exception might be Persistent Volumes. Persistent Volumes are backed by independent First Class Disks (FCD) which may contain stateful data that should be protected. In this use case, array-based snapshots and/or asynchronous/synchronous/Metro Volume replication might be a good fit. For more information about protecting VMware Tanzu Clusters, refer to the section later in this document covering Metro Volume as well as the document Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager protecting VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters.