An administrator is tasked with enabling vSAN Data Protection.

The required action is to deploy the VMware Live Recovery appliance. In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, vSAN Data Protection is powered by VMware Live Recovery and provides local virtual machine protection and remote virtual machine replication for supported vSAN ESA environments. The vSAN Services configuration workflow explicitly states that before vSAN Data Protection can be used, the VMware Live Recovery appliance must be deployed. This appliance provides the data protection control plane required for protection groups, native snapshots, recovery workflows, and replication-based protection. Enabling vSAN advanced options is not sufficient because those settings control cluster behaviors such as repair timers, read locality, thin swap, unmap, and rebalance. Data Services Manager is used for database/data-service lifecycle use cases, not vSAN VM data protection. vSphere Replication can be part of broader site-recovery scenarios, but it is not the required action to enable vSAN Data Protection from the vSAN services workflow. Reference topics: vSAN Data Protection, VMware Live Recovery Appliance, vSAN Services Configuration, Local VM Protection and Replication.