Group-level consistency Protection Groups

Each resource in the group-level consistency Group is individually protected at the same consistency level. Before creating a storage Snapshot, all the VMs are quiesced together at the same time. This consistency level is recommended only when group-level consistency has to be maintained.

The VMs or datastores that you want to add to a group-level consistency Group must be from the same storage systems.

Assume a scenario where the VMDKs of VMs are not from a single datastore. The OS disk of VM1 is on Datastore1 and the data disk is on Datastore2. To make this VM consistent, snapshot has to be created at the same time for both the datastores. In this scenario, use the group-level consistency.

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

At the group-level consistency, the maximum number of datastores that you can add to a Protection Group is limited to 16.

Group-level consistency Protection Groups can be categorized into the following:

  • Generic Group— A folder-like structure that contains either multiple datastores or VMs from a single storage system.

  • Remote Copy capable Group— Group is created when you apply the Remote Snapshot rule on a VM or datastore that is part of Remote Copy Group or device collections.

Remote Copy Groups and HPE Nimble Storage Volume Collections

Remote Copy Groups and HPE Nimble Storage Volume Collection can be protected only at group-level consistency. When protecting Remote Copy Group and HPE Nimble Storage Volume Collection, RMC-V internally creates two Protection Groups (local and remote) with all the datastores in the Remote Copy Group or Volume Collection. The local and remote Protection Groups are created with the same name as the Remote Copy Group.

Target selection for group-level consistency