A company has custom applications storing data on Volume Groups (VGs).

The requirement states:

• Custom apps use Volume Groups

• VM + VG must remain consistent together

• Lowest possible RPO is required (RPO → 0)

• Must survive cluster failure

Nutanix data protection documentation clearly states:

“Synchronous replication provides an RPO of zero by ensuring every write is committed on both sites before acknowledgement.”

Additionally:

“When protecting application VMs using Volume Groups, both the VM and the Volume Group must be placed in the same Consistency Group to ensure write-order fidelity and to preserve database or application integrity during failover.”

This is critical because Volume Groups operate at the block layer, and placing them in separate groups breaks atomic write-order correctness.

Option analysis:

A. Metro AHV provides HA-style zero RPO but is not the required mechanism here because the question specifically references protection policies and VGs, which Metro does not orchestrate in the same way.

B. Synchronous replication alone is not sufficient unless VMs and VGs are inside the same consistency group.

C. This is the correct and complete solution: synchronous replication + consistency grouping ensures RPO0 and atomic updates.

D. NearSync has RPO 1–15 minutes, not the lowest possible RPO.

Therefore, placing both VMs and VGs in the same consistency group under Synchronous Replication is the correct method.