Storage Policy Groups

In Site Recovery Manager 6.1, VMware introduced the concept of Storage Policy-based discovery of datastore groups. Traditionally, storage was only discovered via the SRA- the SRA would discover array pairs and then any devices that were replicated between said pairs. The limitation to this approach was that if a VM was migrated to another datastore by an administrator or via some automated process (e.g. Storage DRS), protection in SRM could break if that datastore was not replicated and specifically not replicated between that array pair. There was no way to ensure that a migration occurred to an appropriate datastore. Even if it did, if the datastore was not part of the SRM protection group the VM could not be protected.

To resolve for this, SRM now offers a new mechanism to discovery storage: tag-based storage policies. With this, SRAs still need to discover devices as replicated. This part does not change. Instead of adding datastores to an SRM protection group, a storage policy can be added:

Inside of vCenter, since VMs placement and configuration is controlled via tags, VMware administrators can make sure they make correct decisions when moving virtual machines, or creating new virtual disks. If they move or create a disk that is under the VM's policy that is not on compatible storage the administrator will be warned.

The process is: