Creating Protection Policies

For Expedient Clients with DRaaS

Expedient will create polices during deployment, but Prism Central maintains an option for self-service and administration.

A protection policy automates the creation and replication of snapshots across all the clusters managed by Prism Central. When you configure a protection policy to create local snapshots, you just specify the RPO, retention policy, and the entities you want to protect. If you want to automate snapshot replication to a remote location, you can also specify the remote location.

Nutanix synchronizes protection policies between paired availability zones. After you perform a failover to the recovery location, that location becomes the primary, and snapshot replication automatically resumes to the former primary location (which has become the new recovery location). If the VPN is connected, your workloads are protected automatically; you don't need to take action to ensure that the two datacenters remain in sync.

Got to Data Protection > Protection Policies

Add a Schedule

• Select Asynchronous (Synchronous is not supported)

• Select the Primary and Recovery locations

• The schedule is the RPO and RTO settings for the protection policy. In all cases we will use Asynchronous Protection Type. This covers both Async and Near-Sync types based on the recovery point select.

• The Retention Policy is set to Roll-Up the snapshots, the calculations are shown below based on the retention duration.

• A 3-day retention with Rollup selected will have 24 hourly snapshots, and 3 daily snapshots.

• Local retention is also set here as well and can be any duration.

Note: if the Local and Remote durations differ, there is an option to Reverse retention and recovery location.

Select a Category

• On the Add Entities section categories are added to the Protection Policy.

• Categories should be assigned to the VMs that should be protected by this policy. Custom categories can be created, or a set of default ones are provided by Nutanix.

Mutiple policies can be configured. If you have tiered applications, for example, you could create a separate category (along with the appropriate VMs) and add it to a different stage.

More information:

Creating Recovery Plans