VMware vSAN Protection and Recovery Deployment

vSAN Protection and Recovery provides a simple way to back up and restore VMs locally using vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). It enables administrators to define groups of VMs along with the backup/snapshot schedule and retention times. These are crash-consistent backups that can be restored using the vSphere Client even if the VMs have been removed from inventory. Perhaps best of all is that this functionality is included with your VCF 9 license.

I plan on writing a series of blog articles about vSAN Protection and Recovery. This first article summarizes the deployment of the Protection and Recovery virtual appliance that enables this functionality. If you would like to read more about the solution itself, see the articles below.

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.