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.
