Which of the following should an administrator establish before deploying a guest VM in a production environment?

A Disaster Recovery Plan focuses narrowly on restoring IT systems after a major incident and is a component of the broader BCP, which should be established first to provide the overarching continuity context.

A patch management schedule is an operational procedure applied after the VM is live and does not need to be established as a prerequisite before deployment.

A Business Continuity Plan defines how critical systems - including newly deployed VMs - support ongoing business operations and specifies the procedures and requirements needed if those systems fail. Establishing the BCP before deployment ensures that redundancy, failover, and availability requirements are incorporated into the VM design from the outset. Without a BCP, a production VM may be deployed without adequate consideration for its business impact or recovery expectations.

An Access Control List is a specific network or resource security configuration, not a planning framework that must be established before a VM goes into production.