Description

aSecurity allows you to enable the data protection policy, where all VMs are snapshot every day for data protection. Snapshots are triggered immediately when security software is uninstalled or suspected of encountering ransomware risks. Scheduled snapshots are persisted so that they will not be overwritten by virus-infected data.

Prerequisites

You have set the snapshot policy to smart mode on HCI. In manual mode, you cannot enable the data protection policy. For more information on how to set the mode, see section 5.2.14 "Manage Snapshot Policies."

Precautions

1. VM snapshots are created automatically every day according to the data protection policy. We recommend that you add critical VMs to the policy to quickly recover data in the case of severe issues such as ransomware.
2. In general, only the latest snapshot is retained. In the case of severe security events such as compromised VMs or suspected ransomware, the latest snapshot before the event occurrence is retained for 7 days.
3. The data protection policy has the following limits on the number of snapshots taken every day:

• Hybrid datastore: vm_num = [0.6 × (host_num - 3) × 4 + 12] × (capacity per SSD × 0.5 × number of SSDs/480 GB). Note: If storage capacities are heterogeneous, the smallest capacity is used for calculation.

• All-flash datastore: 2,048

4. If a selected VM or consistency group is added to a snapshot policy, the VM or consistency group will be removed from the original policy and added to the current data protection policy.
5. After being added to the data protection policy, the VM or consistency group will be snapshot once every day.

Steps

1. Go to aSecurity > Security Capabilities > Data Protection Policy and click Enable. This policy is enabled by default.
2. Go to Reliability > Snapshots > Snapshot Policies. Two snapshot policies automatically generated by the system are displayed.
3. Click Add on the VM tab or Consistency Group tab to add a VM or consistency group to the data protection policy.