When a failover condition has been met, failover will be triggered automatically if you disabled the wait for user option during your failover configuration. If the wait for user before failover option is enabled, you will be notified in the console when a failover condition has been met. At that time, you will need to trigger it manually from the console when you are ready.
When you are ready to begin failover, click Failover.
Because the Windows product activation is dependent on hardware, you may need to reactivate your Windows registration after failover. In most cases when you are using Windows 2003, you can follow the on-screen prompts to complete the reactivation. However, when you are using Windows 2008, the reactivation depends on your licensing type. If a Windows 2008 target comes online after failover with an activation failure, use the steps appropriate for your license type.
Some applications and hardware devices create and use software devices within the operating system, but they have the characteristics of a hardware device. For example, software RAID solutions are typically implemented in the operating system, however they are still designed to emulate a single piece of storage hardware. In these cases, the device will not be failed over because it appears to be a hardware device.
You may experience issues following a failover if an application or server uses hard-linked files. For example, Windows 2008 Server Roles added after full-server protection has been established will not function after failover because the hard links related to the server role were not replicated. After updating server roles, a remirror should be performed.
If your NICs were configured for network load balancing (NLB), you will have to reconfigure that after failover.