Virtualization's core strength in disaster recovery: Virtualization abstracts the operating system and applications from the underlying hardware. This means a virtual machine (VM) running on one physical server can be easily copied or moved to a completely different physical server, even one with different hardware specifications. This portability is crucial for disaster recovery.
A VM is essentially a set of files. These files can be easily copied or moved to another physical server or storage location.
Instead of lengthy OS and application reinstalls, you simply need to start the VM on the recovery hardware. This significantly reduces downtime and improves Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
******
A) While virtualization does consolidate servers, reducing footprint and some points of failure, this is a side effect beneficial to DR, not the core reason it's helpful. The primary benefit for DR is the portability of VMs.
C) Data replication and backup are important aspects of DR, and virtualization technologies often integrate with these, but virtualization itself doesn't provide these capabilities. These are separate technologies that complement virtualization in a DR plan.
D) While virtualization facilitates failover to a secondary data center by making it easy to move VMs, it doesn't automatically do it. Automation requires additional orchestration and failover mechanisms built on top of the virtualization platform.