vSAN Data Protection in VMware Cloud Foundation – The Solution You Already Own

Local Protection the Easy Way Simple and Flexible Recovery Fast and Flexible Cloning How to Get Started Install the Virtual Appliance used for vSAN Data Protection Configure Protection Groups Extended Functionality in VCF 9.0 Summary Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Scaling VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Lab Environments using Holodeck 9.0 VMware Cloud Foundation Automation - All Apps Organization Configurations Workload Placement in VMware Cloud Foundation: Smarter VM Deployment for Performance and Efficiency With a flurry of announcements and new capabilities offered in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, it is sometimes easy to overlook relatively new features hidden in plain sight. Protecting data in a private cloud has been a hot topic as of late, extending well beyond just typical data recovery requirements. Customers are looking to devise practical strategies to protect themselves against ransomware attacks and disaster recovery using solutions that are easy to manage at scale. vSAN Data Protection initially debuted in vSAN 8 U3, as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of vSAN Data Protection is that it is a part of the VCF license! Why is this so important? If you are running vSAN ESA in your VCF environment, you have everything you need to locally protect your workloads using vSAN Data Protection. It can serve as a terrific way to augment your existing protection strategies or serve as the foundation for more comprehensive protection. Let’s take a brief look at what this local protection can do for you, and how you can adopt it in a simple and scalable way. As a part of your VCF license, vSAN Data Protection gives you the ability to use snapshots the way you always envisioned. Using vSAN ESA’s native snapshotting engine, it allows you to: Easily define groups of VMs and their protection and retention schedules — retaining up to 200 snapshots per VM. Create crash-consistent snapshots of VMs at regular intervals with little to no impact on performance. Easily restore one or more VMs directly in vCenter Server using the vSphere Client, even if they have been removed from inventory. Since vSAN Data Protection protects at the VM level, protecting and restoring discrete VMDKs within a VM is not possible at this time.