When you create storage policy protection groups, you must first create storage policies and ensure that your environment meets certain prerequisites.
Prerequisites
- Create datastore tags and assign them to datastores to associate with a storage policy:
- If your environment does not use Enhanced Linked Mode, create tag categories and tags on both the protected site and the recovery site, and assign them to the datastores to protect on the protected site.
- If your environment uses Enhanced Linked Mode, create tag categories and tags only on the protected site. The tags are replicated to other vCenter Server instances in Enhanced Linked Mode environments.
- Create virtual machine storage policies in vCenter Server on both sites, that include the tags that you assigned to the datastores to protect. Create virtual machine policies on both sites even if your environment uses Enhanced Linked Mode. The storage policies can have different names on each site.
- Associate virtual machines to protect with the appropriate storage policy on the protected site. You must associate all the virtual machine's disks with the same storage policy.
- Configure array-based replication of the datastores from the protected site to the recovery site by using the replication technology that your array vendor provides.
- Configure inventory mappings in Site Recovery Manager. Storage policy protection groups have specific behavior concerning the application of inventory mappings, and requirements on how to set the resource inventory mappings. For example, if you use storage policy protection groups and you do not configure mappings, planned migration or disaster recovery fail, but Site Recovery Manager finishes successfully your operation with temporary placeholder mappings.
- When Site Recovery Manager Server starts, Site Recovery Manager queries the storage policy-based management and tag manager services in vCenter Server to find virtual machines that are associated with a storage policy. These services and vCenter Server must be running when you start or restart Site Recovery Manager Server. If they are not running, Site Recovery Manager Server does not start.
For information about how to create storage policies, see Virtual Machine Storage Policies in the VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server 7.0 Documentation.
For information about how to create inventory mappings, see Configure Inventory Mappings.
For information about storage policy protection groups and inventory mappings, see Inventory Mappings for Storage Policy Protection Groups.
For information about known limitations of storage policy protection groups, see Limitations of Storage Policy Protection Groups.
