Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
What this domain tests
Data Protection and Disaster Recovery tests RPO/RTO design, snapshots, replication, protection domains, consistency groups, backup retention, and tested failover. The focus is recoverability, not merely taking snapshots.
Core rules
- RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss; RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime. A replication schedule cannot deliver an RPO shorter than its interval plus lag.
- Snapshots are recovery points, not independent backups. Keep an off-cluster or off-site copy for ransomware, site loss, or corrupt data.
- Protection domains group VMs and volumes for consistent replication. Applications with dependent VMs need a consistency group or ordered recovery plan.
- Retention must fit capacity and policy. More hourly snapshots increase storage use and replication change rate.
Worked example
An application needs RPO 30 minutes and RTO 2 hours. Use asynchronous replication every 30 minutes, monitor lag, and retain 48 hourly and 14 daily recovery points. Confirm the DR site can absorb the replicated data and that runbooks re-IP, re-DNS, and start VMs in dependency order. Test a non-disruptive failover quarterly and measure actual RTO.
Traps
Treating snapshots as backups; ignoring replication lag and bandwidth; forgetting DNS, IP, and certificate changes; retaining beyond capacity; and documenting a DR plan that was never tested. A successful replication status is not the same as a successful recovery.