I have a small SRM recovery plan for a few "core services" VMs on an EqualLogic unit replicating between two data centers. I'd like to perform some planned, temporary failovers to keep these VMs available in the case of power outages, switch upgrades, etc.
One idea I had was to change my Network mappings in my recovery plan to go to actual networks, rather than the test bubble switch that's the default. I would manuall shut down the production VMs, run a test failover for the period of the outage, then end the test and power back up the production VMs. This seems a little messy, but I believe it would work.
The above idea seems a little messy, so I also considered running the actual recovery plan. Since I have never had to run the actual recovery plan, I am a little wary of what will change when I do. Is failing back as simple as shutting down the VMs on the recovery side and powering up the VMs on the protected side? This would be for a short period, so I'm not really concerned about any data changes on the VM during the failover.
Apologies if my question isn't really clear. I essentially want to failover for a brief period (one hour), and then simply power down the failover VMs and resume things as they were before the failover - I don't care about failback in terms of storage changes, etc.
Why not just do a vMotion to the recovery ESX servers? If you do a failover you will have to reboot the VM's - unless you have VMware Fault Tolerance.