Recovery During Platform Transformation: Protecting Mixed Versions, Mixed Hypervisors, and In-Flight Migrations

This article discusses the critical risks to disaster recovery and backup during IT platform transformations such as VMware upgrades, hypervisor migrations, or multi-year replacements. It argues that recovery coverage often becomes weakest precisely when migration and configuration risks are highest, due to changing storage, networking, identity, and compute dependencies. The article provides a transformation recovery architecture, advising against retiring source recovery chains until destination chains are fully tested and accepted. It covers protecting mixed versions, hypervisors, and in-flight migrations, validating compatibility with Broadcom interoperability matrices, and making cutover decisions. The content is directly relevant to IT/technology professionals managing infrastructure changes.