A distributed information processing system comprises first and second sites, which may comprise respective production and replica sites. A snapshot of a first portion of a complex asset is generated at the first site and sent to the second site, and a second portion of the complex asset is replicated at the second site. The complex asset includes one or more virtual machines provided by one or more hypervisors of a virtualization platform of the first site and at least one storage element surfaced through a storage platform of the first site, with the storage platform being external to the virtualization platform. Recovery of the complex asset is implemented at the second site utilizing, for example, a ghost complex asset preconfigured in accordance with current complex asset state information based on the snapshot of the first portion of the complex asset and the replicated second portion of the complex asset.