Creating a Life Cycle Policy

Create a life cycle policy for the following scenarios:

To identify resources that can be used for live mounts and to specify parameters for live mount operations.
To enable testing failover operations for VMs using live mounts.
To support Virtualize Me operations.

Before You Begin

Add the hypervisor for the recovery target.
For Virtualize Me policies, download the required Windows or UNIX ISO files and copy them to a location on the destination host.

Procedure

From the navigation pane, go to Configuration > Life cycle policies.
Click Add policy.

The Create policy wizard displays the General page.
Provide the following information:
- Policy name: Enter a descriptive name for the policy.
- Select type: Select VMware from the list.
- Destination hypervisor: Select the hypervisor where the VM will be mounted.
Click Next.

The Configuration page appears. The information you enter will be used for all operations using the policy.
Provide the following information:
- Destination host: Click Browse to select an ESX host that can be used for VMs.
- VM display name: Select Prefix or Suffix, and then enter a string that will be appended to the source VM name to create the VM display name for the destination VM.
- Datastore: Select a destination datastore.
- Destination network: Select a network that can be used by destination VMs.
Click Next.

The Settings page appears.
Provide the following information:
- Resource and quota limits:
  - No of VMs (per user): Select the number of concurrent VMs that each user can run using this policy.
- User membership and expiration:
  - User and user groups: Select users or user groups that should have access to the policy.
  - Live mount options: Select this option to display settings that are specific to live mount operations.
    
    Expiration time: Select Hours or Days and specify the amount of time that live mounted VMs can run before they expire.
    
    To keep VMs available beyond the expiry time, select the Migrate VMs option.
    
    Users can also renew or delete VMs.
    
    MediaAgent: To use a specific MediaAgent for live mounts, select this option and then choose a MediaAgent from the list.
- Additional settings:
  - Virtualize Me options: Select this option to display options that are specific to Virtualize Me.
    
    Iso path (Windows): Click Browse to select the path for the Windows ISO file.
    
    Iso path (Unix): Click Browse to select the path for the UNIX ISO file.
  - Migrate VMs: To enable live mounted VMs to be mounted to the destination datastore for extended availability, select this option.
    
    Wait before migration (in hours): To specify a delay between live mounting VMs and migrating the VMs to a datastore for extended availability, specify the number of hours.
Click Finish.