[VMC] Site Recovery Manager Target site storage policy best practices

Products

• VMware Cloud on AWS

Issue/Introduction

Placeholder VMs are created on VMware Cloud target or destination sites when protecting Virtual Machines(VMs) using Site Recovery Manager(SRM). 
SRM leverages vSphere Replication to create a placeholder VM which contains a minimal configuration file at the destination. This document seeks to outline storage policy best practices for these sites.

Resolution

Utilizing an FTT=0 storage policy at the destination site is NOT RECOMMENDED.
FTT=0 can lead to:
- loss of placeholder VM data, resulting in the placeholder VMs becoming inaccessible
- loss of replicated disk data, resulting in the need to replicate data from scratch which sets back recovery efforts

At minimum, a RAID1 FTT=1 policy should be employed when defining a storage policy.

It is important to protect Replication configuration files and replicated disk data from host failures or unforeseen storage hardware events.

For guidance on SLA supported RAID configurations, please see: VMC SLA

Additional Information

Shared Responsibility Model Overview