Introduction to VMware vSAN Data Protection

VMware vSAN Data Protection, introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, is a powerful capability included in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) license for customers running vSAN ESA. This solution provides local protection for virtual machine workloads at no additional licensing cost. Key capabilities include:

• Define protection groups and retention schedules.
• Schedule crash-consistent snapshots of VMs at regular intervals.
• Create immutable snapshots to help recover from ransomware.
• Retain up to 200 snapshots per VM.
• Per-VM replication locally and/or to remote clusters.

The simplicity and tight integration of the tool make it a terrific way to augment existing data protection strategies or serve as a basic, but effective solution for protecting virtual machine workloads. The images below show the UI and provide some context. You can click the images to get a better look.

vSAN Data Protection simplifies common recovery tasks, giving administrators the ability to restore one or more VMs directly within the vSphere Client, even if they have been deleted from inventory—a capability not supported by historical VMware snapshots. Getting started involves deploying the VMware Live Recovery (VLR) virtual appliance and configuring protection groups, which can also be set to create immutable snapshots for basic ransomware resilience.

For extended functionality, VCF 9.0 introduces a unified virtual appliance and the option for vSAN-to-vSAN replication to other clusters for disaster recovery, which is available with an add-on license. More information about VMware Live Recovery: https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/live-recovery