Prior to the demotion of any pod (a source pod or a target pod) any storage in that pod must be removed from use first. Any VM sitting on a VMFS datastore in that pod must be shutdown and unregistered. Any VMFS must be unmounted. Any RDM must be moved from active VMs, or those VMs must be shutdown and unregistered. Follow the steps described in this post to do so. The overall process to demote a pod is:
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Shutdown and VMs running on datastores or using RDMs from the source pod.
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Unregister those virtual machines.
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Unmount the datastores
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Demote the source pod
Note:
In general, Everpure recommends investing in VMware's Site Recovery Manager as it automates all of these steps in a simple and integrated way. Furthermore it provides run book tracking and resource mapping. Not using SRM is fully supported, but it is important to track changes, VM network mappings, RDM usage, and VM ordering manually to make sure a DR event is smoothly handled.