An AHV VM is powered on with existing data on its disks. An administrator edits the Prism Central storage policy associated with the VM's category to change its replication factor and compression settings. How will the policy change affect the VM?

Prism Central storage policies apply to VMs through their categories, so editing the policy changes the target behavior for every VM it covers, while the VMs stay powered on. New writes follow the new settings as soon as the policy is applied. Existing data is not rewritten in one foreground pass, because that would create an I/O storm across the cluster; instead, Curator's background scans find extents that don't match the new settings and fix them over time, for example adding or removing replicas after a replication factor change and compressing data that was stored uncompressed. Until those scans finish, the VM's disks may hold a mix of old-format and new-format data, which is normal. A powered-off VM or detached disk is not required; policy updates are designed for live workloads. Expecting an immediate full rewrite misreads how AOS protects foreground performance. Editing a policy also doesn't change the container's own settings; the policy is scoped to the categorized VMs, and VMs without the category keep following the container. Exam caveat: raising RF requires enough nodes and a matching cluster fault tolerance, and capacity changes appear gradually as background tasks complete. Operational check: watch Curator task activity and the VM's storage usage in Prism, and confirm the policy shows as applied to the VM.