multiple datastore selection in protection groups creation

[yannigbeyet]

Hello,

I don't understand why my create protection group checkbox is alone as I have 4 datastore to protect (see image below).

Any idea ?

vsphere 5.1u3

vcenter 5.1u3 (windows)

SRM 5.1.3

EMC recoverpoint 4.1SP1 P1

EMC VNX 5300 FCoE

recoverpoint SRA 2.2

Regards.

[basher · Accepted solution]

Hello,

There are two possible reasons:

1. The LUNs backing these datastores are part of a consistency group defined at the storage array level

2. There is one or more VMs that have disks on multiple datastores

Most likely, it is the second one. Imagine you have these 4 datatstores.

if you have VM1 that has disks on datastore XX_HIGH_DCN and XX_HIGH2_DCN, then SRM would group these datastores together. Then if you have VM2 that has disks on XX_HIGH_DCN and XX_LOW_DCN (e.g. OS disk and application disk) then XX_LOW_DCN is added to the group. One more VM spanning 2 datastores and you have all 4 in a group. Or you may have 1 VM with disks on all 4 datastores. In any case SRM tries to compute a group of datastores such that all VMs in this group can be successfully recovered together.

Best regards

Stefan

[rcporto]

If a single VM have disks in more than one datastore the protection group will contain all datastores that store disks from this VM.

[admin]

As the previous comments have mentioned this is related to SRM computing a datastore group based on the VMs VMDKs on those datastores, or the array consistency groups the datastores may belong to. Details of this are provided in the Administration Guide for SRM here -> About Array-Based Protection Groups and Datastore Groups