By using Service Level Agreement (SLA) profiles for protections, the service providers can define and control the following SLA settings: Recovery Point Objective (RPO), advanced retention policies for the rotated instances, quiesce, compression, and initial synchronization time.

SLA Settings Enforced by SLA Profiles

As a provider, you can assign one or more SLA profiles to multiple VMware Cloud Director organizations to control the following SLA settings of the protections.

  • The target recovery point objective (RPO). For information about the RPO, see Replicating workloads.
  • For protections, allow advanced retention rules and add rule, up to five rules, to enable retention policy configuration for the number of rotated instances and their time distance spread apart. For more information, see Advanced Retention Rules in Using instances.
  • Whether quiesce is activated to ensure application level consistency before creating an instance.
  • Whether the replication traffic compression is activated to reduce network traffic at the expense of CPU.
  • Timeslot that allows to set a delay start that is convenient for the first synchronization.
After you assign one or more SLA profiles to an organization, the assigned SLA profiles can be selected in the replication settings.
Note: Migrations do not use SLA profiles.

Predefined SLA Profiles

By default, VMware Cloud Director Availability provides the following predefined SLA profiles that are not assigned to any organization. The predefined SLA profiles set the following SLA settings.

Table 1. Predefined SLA Profile Settings
SLA Setting Gold Silver Bronze
SLA profile name Gold Silver Bronze
Target recovery point objective (RPO) 30 minutes 2 hours 4 hours
Retention policy for point in time instances Selected Deselected
Preserve retained instances 14 7 Keep latest instance only.
Retained instances over the last 1 day
Activate quiesce No
Compress replication traffic Selected
Delay start synchronization No delay

As a provider, you can modify the SLA settings of the predefined SLA profiles, delete them, or create additional SLA profiles.

Using Custom SLA Settings

To use custom SLA settings instead of selecting an SLA profile in the protections, activate the Custom SLA settings toggle in the replication policy. For more information, see Configuring replication policies.