Resource-level consistency Protection Groups

Each resource in the resource-level consistency Group is individually protected, all at different consistency levels. Individual VMs or all VMs in a datastore are quiesced independently and then separate storage snapshots are created. When protection is requested at VM-level, only those VMs for which you are creating snapshots are quiesced. When the VMs need similar protection and if the group-level consistency is not required, use the resource-level consistency.

You can add VVol VMs only to resource-level consistency Groups. These Groups do not support VMFS VMs.

Assume a scenario where a datastore contains VM1 and VM2 and only VM1 is added to a Protection Group. In this case, only VM1 is quiesced but not VM2 even though both VMs are shown as protected. VM2 is protected with crash-consistent Copy. To avoid this inconsistency, instead of adding individual VMs, you can add datastores to a Protection Group.

Figure 3: Sample scenario of protecting datastores or VMs in a Protection Group at resource-level consistency