Virtual machines are a pleasure to work with when it comes to recovery and replication. They can be replicated at scale to an alternative cloud environment with relative ease from the comfort of your desktop. In contrast, physical machines offer far less automation when it comes to recovery and in many cases will require manual intervention to ensure systems are back online quickly. If physical-to-physical (P2P) machine recovery is required, this can present device driver conflicts unless the source and target machines are built from identical hardware. Physical machines will require a boot image to be made available either from directly attached storage or through a network share. Any form of manual intervention takes time which may be acceptable for a single system, but for many enterprise or data center situations a physical server estate may number into the hundreds or more. Physical system recovery can therefore be the major culprit in prolonging downtime following any form of system outage.
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