A pod demotion makes all of the volumes in the pod unable to accept new writes ("demoting" it from an active state). Therefore, it is important to make sure the hosts using that storage are prepared for the sudden loss of write access to the storage. A pod demotion does not disconnect the volumes from a host--it instead only changes their read/write state. In the case of a VMware environment the "hosts" using the storage are of two types; the virtual machines, and the ESXi hosts.
Therefore the process to prepare a VMware environment involves shutting down virtual machines running off of the ActiveDR-protected storage and informing the ESXi hosts that this storage will go away.
For virtual machines that use ActiveDR storage but for whatever reason need to continue running after a demotion you should either:
- Storage vMotion the virtual machine(s) or the affected virtual disk(s) to storage that is not in the to-be-demoted pod.
- Remove virtual disk(s) or RDMs that are stored in the to-be-demoted pod from those virtual machine(s).
Instructions on these two particular steps are well-documented in VMware collateral and no special process needs to be followed in the case of ActiveDR. Therefore instructions on performing either of these tasks are beyond the scope of this document.