Use the "Test Activate Disaster Recovery". This will let the volumes continue to replicate and create a View Volume from the DR side of things. It doesn't touch the production environment at all.  The Enterprise Manager Administration Guide has lots more information on this in Chapter 23.

If you are going to be testing the functionality of the VMs, you need to make sure there is no real network connectivity because the VMs will come up with the same IP info as production. :-)

Thank you I understand all that. I am just curious if when an "Activate Disaster Recovery" is initiated, will Enterprise Manager break the mapping on the Volumes/Servers on the Source Compellent? Because you could want to initiate a DR recovery and not be in a DR situation. Ie you need to move load over, or may there is another "disaster"--say major network outage or something, and your Source Compellent/hosts are just fine---but you need to activate the DR for a certain number of Volumes. IF Enterprise Manager for instance on Activating Disaster Recovery for say Volume12 unmaps Volume12 on the Source Compellent from the ESX hosts, then now you have to contend with potential APDs from the ESX hosts if you dont intervene. I hope I am explaining myself correctly. I just cant find anywhere in the documentation what EM does with the SOURCE mapping of Volumes/Servers(clusters). Thanks!