6.1

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel [phone] Fax [phone] www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2015 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellec
tual property laws. VMware products a
re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other mark
s and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
A protection group is a collection of one or more virtual machines that are failed over and failed
back as a unit. In many cases, a protection group consists of multiple virtual machines that
support a service such as an accounting system. For example, a service might consist of a
database server, two application servers, and two web servers. In most cases, it is not be
beneficial to fail over part of a service (only one or two of the servers in the example). All five
servers would be included in a protection group to enable failover of the service.
Creating a protection group for each application or service also has the benefit of selective
testing. With Site Recovery Manager, having a protection group for each application enables
non-disruptive, low-risk testing of individual applications. Application owners can test disaster
recovery plans, as needed.
Larger environments usually have higher numbers of applications. Creating a protection group
for each application in these larger environments may not be practical and might exceed the
maximum supported number of protection groups in Site Recovery Manager. Please see
Operational Limits for Site Recovery Manager (2105500) for details.
There are other organizational methods to consider when creating protection groups. One is
creating a protection group for each business unit - all virtual machines belonging to a specific
business unit are placed in a protection group. Another method is grouping virtual machines
together by application tier. For example, all database servers in one protection group, all
middleware servers in a second protection group, and all client-facing servers in a third
protection group. While these approaches have their limitations, they also reduce the number of
protection groups to create and manage.
Email Business Intelligence Accounting
Protection Group 1 Mailbox (database)
Warehouse
(database)
Records (database)
Protection Group 2 Hub Transport Application
Protection Group 3 Client Access Web Application
Figure 11. Creating Protection Groups by Application Tier
There is no recommendation for the number of protection groups to create as this varies with
each organization depending on business and technical requirements. An organization must
decide what method is best for its purposes. More protection groups increase the flexibility of
testing and failover while fewer protection groups lowers complexity.
Figure 12. Protection Groups: The Balance of Flexibility and Complexity