Dell NetWorker 19.9 Administration Guide

Policies

Policies provide you with a service-catalog approach to the configuration of a NetWorker datazone. Policies enable you to manage all data protection tasks and the data protection lifecycle from a central location.

Policies provide an organizational container for the workflows, actions, and groups that support and define the backup, clone, management, and system maintenance actions that you want to perform.

Workflows

The policy workflow defines a list of actions to perform sequentially or concurrently, a schedule window during which the workflow can run, and the protection group to which the workflow applies. You can create a workflow when you create a new policy, or you can create a workflow for an existing policy.

A workflow can be as simple as a single action that applies to a finite list of Client resources, or a complex chain of actions that apply to a dynamically changing list of resources. In a workflow, some actions can be set to occur sequentially, and others can occur concurrently.

You can create multiple workflows in a single policy. However, each workflow can belong to only one policy. When you add multiple workflows to the same policy, you can logically group data protection activities with similar service level provisions together, to provide easier configuration, access, and task execution.

Protection groups

Protection groups define a set of static or dynamic Client resources or save sets to which a workflow applies. There are also dedicated protection groups for backups in a VMware environment or for snapshot backups on a NAS device. Review the following information about protection groups:

• Create one protection group for each workflow. Each group can be assigned to only one workflow.
• You can add the same Client resources and save sets to more than one group at a time.
• You can create the group before you create the workflow, or you can create the group after you create the workflow and then assign the group to the workflow later.

Actions

Actions are the key resources in a workflow for a data protection policy and define a specific task (for example, a backup or clone) that occurs on the client resources in the group assigned to the workflow. NetWorker uses a work list to define the task. A work list is composed of one or several work items. Work items include client resources, virtual machines, save sets, or tags. You can chain multiple actions together to occur sequentially or concurrently in a workflow. All chained actions use the same work list.

When you configure an action, you define the days on which to perform the action, as well as other settings specific to the action. For example, you can specify a destination pool, browse and retention period, and a target storage node for the backup action, which can differ from the subsequent action that clones the data.

When you create an action for a policy that is associated with the virtual machine backup, you can select one of the following data protection action types:

• Backup — Performs a backup of virtual machines in vCenter to a Data Domain system. You can only perform one VMware backup action per workflow. The VMware backup action must occur before clone actions.
• Clone — Performs a clone of the VMware backup on a Data Domain system to any clone device that NetWorker supports (including Data Domain system or tape targets). You can specify multiple clone actions. Clone actions must occur after the Backup action.

You can create multiple actions for a single workflow. However, each action applies to a single workflow and policy.

The following figure provides a high level overview of the components that make up a data protection policy in a datazone.