Virtual machine garbage collection automation

Overview

Virtual machine (VM) garbage collection automation provides an automated mechanism to clean up VM resources on the source cluster during Disaster Recovery (DR) failover or relocation workflows. This reduces manual effort and helps users perform DR operations more quickly, supporting lower Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

Prerequisites

• Virtual machine protection must be enabled through the Fusion Data Foundation Virtualization console.

How it works

During DR failover or relocation, VM resources that are protected and orchestrated by the Fusion Data Foundation Virtualization console are automatically deleted from the source cluster.

This deletion uses Kubernetes' owner-based garbage collection principles, ensuring that associated child resources, such as disks and pods, are also removed cleanly as part of normal Kubernetes garbage collection.

Known risks and limitations

• Automation applies only to VM resources whose protection is managed by the Fusion Data Foundation Virtualization console.
• Other discovered application workload types, including GitOps-managed and other non-VM resources, remain out of scope and require manual cleanup.
• Automation is limited to resources directly owned by the VM lifecycle.