Plan Overview

Create policies, schedules, and jobs on the Plan Plan tab icon tab. You can also, edit, view and delete policies and schedules using this tab.

A policy is a user-defined set of tasks and rules. Once a policy is added to ECX, it can be combined with a schedule or trigger to create a job. There are several policy types including catalog, report, scripts, Copy Data and Use Data.

A schedule is a set of rules for triggering a policy. Create a schedule to apply to one or more jobs. Once a schedule is applied, the job sessions are run as defined by the parameters of the schedule.

A job is an execution of a policy. When a job is run, the job session status is monitored and its status can be watched real-time in the job monitor. Job sessions are run on demand or by trigger.

Best Practice: Create a schedule before creating a job definition so that you can easily add the schedule to the job definition.

Policy Types

Catalog Data policies

Catalog policies interrogate storage systems to gather and record metadata about objects and files. There are two types of NetApp ONTAP catalog policies:

NetApp ONTAP Storage Catalog Data policies, which are high-level objects.
NetApp ONTAP File Catalog Data policies, which are low-level objects.

Tip: NetApp ONTAP File Inventory jobs may take a long time to run because they catalog at a file level. Consider creating NetApp ONTAP File Inventory job definitions that constrain the number of file system objects to catalog by limiting the number of storage systems and volume processed by a single job. You can also stagger the scheduled run times of the jobs to prevent them from running concurrently. Consider running NetApp ONTAP File Inventory jobs less frequently than you run NetApp ONTAP Storage Inventory jobs.

For VMware, a catalog policy interrogates VMware hosts to gather and record information about vCenters, ESX servers, datastores, LUNs, and VMs, including VMDKs and datastores.

Copy Data and Use Data policies

ECX utilizes automated Copy Data Management workflows for replicating and intelligently reusing snapshots, vaults, and mirrors. Backup and Restore jobs offer control over testing and cloning use cases, instant recovery, and full disaster recovery. Through Backup and Restore jobs, you can:

Copy data from a variety of storage providers to multiple locations.
Reuse and recover resources from snapshots, vaults, mirrors, and other copies and replicas.
Support use cases for automated data protection, recovery, DevOps, Dev/Test, data and database validation with data masking, through the use of automated Instant Disk Restore, Instant VM Restore, volume, and file restore functionalities.

Report policies

A Report policy is a type of Analyze Data policy that summarizes information about cataloged providers and the data and other resources that reside on them.

Script policies

A Script policy defines a set of commands to run on the ECX appliance. Use the script policy to add functionality to ECX. A script can consist of one or many commands, such as a shell script.

Maintenance policy

The Maintenance job removes resources and associated objects created by ECX when a job in a pending state is deleted. The cleanup procedure reclaims space on your storage devices, cleans up your ECX catalog, and removes related snapshots.