Protection groups enable a set of clusters to tolerate and recover from disaster by managing the resource groups for services. Protection groups can exist only in a partnership. You must create a partnership before you can create a protection group for that partnership. One partner cluster is the primary cluster of the protection group, and the other partner cluster is the secondary cluster. A protection group contains application resource groups and properties for managing data replication for those application resource groups. You must duplicate the application resource group configuration on partner clusters. The configuration for a protection group is identical on partner clusters, so partner clusters must have the application resource groups of the protection group defined in their configuration. The Geographic Edition framework propagates protection group configurations between partners.
You can specify a data replication type in the protection group to indicate the mechanism that is used for data replication between partner clusters. A protection group supports only one data replication type. A protection group can manage one or more application resource groups. When a service is protected from disaster by data replication, the protection group also contains replication resource groups. Protection groups link an application in a resource group with the application data that should be replicated. This linkage and replication enable the application to fail over seamlessly from one cluster to another cluster.