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The nature of VDI environments is to create pools of VMs that are not necessarily tied to a specific user. This ability reduces the administration of the environment and also reduces the need for backups, disaster recovery, and data-loss mitigation.
This design also reduces the need for replication. Since data is typically not stored in the user VMs, the VMs do not need to be copied offsite. A VM pool can quickly be created offsite if the infrastructure is available, including the template VMs.
User data from file shares can be replicated in several ways. PowerStore uses protection policies to take snapshots and replicate data, as shown in the following figure.
Protection policies can be created for file or block data. For NAS data, a protocol snapshot policy can be created to ensure that redirected user data is protected. The snapshots can be used in a read-only mode for deleted or damaged file recovery without impacting active file systems.
Once a protection policy has been created to take snapshots at the required interval, it can be replicated to another system.