SR-IOV provides VMs with direct access to physical NIC hardware, a configuration that is specific to the host. During a failover to a recovery site, the specific physical hardware cannot be guaranteed to be present or available. To ensure the VM can successfully start and have network connectivity, Nutanix Disaster Recovery automatically replaces the SR-IOV virtual NIC with a standard, hypervisor-based virtio-net adapter. As part of a planned failover, the VM is then powered on to restore service, albeit without the performance benefits of SR-IOV.

A. In a planned failover, the goal is to resume operations, so VMs are powered on. Leaving them powered off would defeat the purpose of the recovery plan.

B. The SR-IOV configuration is tied to the source host's physical hardware and is not transferred or guaranteed to exist on the recovery cluster hosts.

D. Nutanix DR is designed to handle VMs with SR-IOV. It does not fail the recovery process but instead gracefully reverts the NIC to a compatible virtual adapter.

1. Nutanix Prism Central Disaster Recovery Guide (pc.2023.4), "Entity Support and Limitations" section, subsection "VMs with SR-IOV". The documentation states: "You can protect the VMs with SR-IOV enabled. At the recovery AZ, the recovered VMs have the SR-IOV NICs replaced by standard NICs."