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ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10

Protect using host cluster protection

Contributors netapp-jani
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ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere manages the protection of host clusters. All the datastores belonging to the selected SVM and mounted on one or more hosts of the cluster are protected under a host cluster.

Before you begin

Make sure you meet these requirements before you protect a host cluster:

  • The host cluster contains datastores from a single SVM only.

  • Datastores on the host cluster aren't mounted on hosts outside the cluster.

  • Datastores mounted on the host cluster are VMFS datastores with iSCSI or FC protocol. You can't use vVols, NFS, or VMFS datastores with NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP protocols.

  • Datastores based on FlexVol/LUN volumes mounted on a host are not part of any consistency group.

  • Datastores based on FlexVol/LUN volumes mounted on a host are not part of any SnapMirror relationships.

  • The host cluster contains at least one datastore.

Steps

  1. Log in to the vSphere client.

  2. Right-click on a host cluster and select NetApp ONTAP tools > Protect Cluster.

  3. In the protect cluster window, the system automatically fills in the datastore type and source storage virtual machine (VM) details. Select the datastores link to view the protected datastores.

  4. Select Add Relationship.

  5. In the Add SnapMirror Relationship window, select the Target storage VM and the Policy type.

    The policy type can be Asynchronous or AutomatedFailOverDuplex.

    When you add the SnapMirror relationship as an AutomatedFailOverDuplex type policy, you must add the target storage VM as storage backend to the same vCenter where ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere is deployed.

    In the AutomatedFailOverDuplex policy type, there are uniform and non-uniform host configurations. When you select the uniform host configuration toggle button, the host initiator group configuration is implicitly replicated on the target site. For more information, refer to Key concepts and terms.

  6. If you choose to have a non-uniform host configuration, select the host access (source/target) for each host inside that cluster.

  7. Select Add.

  8. You can edit the host cluster protection using the Modify host cluster protection operation. You can edit or delete the relationships using the ellipsis menu options.

  9. Select the Protect button.

    The system creates a vCenter task with job ID details and shows its progress in the recent tasks panel. This is an asynchronous task; the user interface shows only the request submission status and does not wait for the task to complete.

  10. To view the protected host clusters, go to NetApp ONTAP tools > Protection > Host cluster relationships. Select a consistency group to view its capacity, associated datastores, and child consistency groups.

Note

If you need to remove protection within one hour of creation, run storage discovery first.
Related information

VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC)