Protection groups are objects that enable SRM to protect virtual machines. The groups can be independent or organized into folders, though the group names should be unique across the folders.
For array-based replication, there are two types of protection groups:
- Datastore groups
- Virtual Volumes
As previously noted, PowerFlex does not support Virtual Volumes with SRM, so datastore groups must be used.
A datastore group is a logical grouping of devices and is the smallest unit of storage that can be failed over or tested independently with PowerFlex. There are several rules that control how SRM calculates datastore groups:
- If a replicated device is used by a datastore containing virtual machines, all devices used by that datastore are combined.
- If a device is a part of a consistency group, all devices in the consistency group are combined.
- If a virtual machine spans multiple datastores, all devices belonging to all such datastores are combined.
Protection groups can include one or more datastore groups and are one type of building block of recovery plans. Protection groups include the datastores groups which are to be failed over simultaneously. As such, failover is absolute-either the entire protection group fails over or none of it.