Methods, systems, and computer program products for storage system-based replication for disaster recovery in virtualized environments are provided herein. A computer-implemented method includes identifying, among multiple storage aggregation units within a virtualized environment, one or more of the storage aggregation units to undergo a change in disaster recovery replication status from (i) enabled to disabled or (ii) disabled to enabled; determining one of multiple mechanisms to execute the change in disaster recovery replication status for each of the identified storage aggregation units by (i) implementing an optimization algorithm to each of the multiple mechanisms and (ii) identifying the one of the multiple mechanisms that minimizes data copy overhead based on the optimization algorithm; and executing the change in disaster recovery replication status for each of the identified storage aggregation units within the virtualized environment in accordance with the one of the multiple mechanisms that minimizes data copy overhead.