Primarily, this question is a hand-holding exercise, I*think* this will work but I guess I just need reassurance, because I've never tried to suspend a virtual machine for this purpose. Googling like a headless chicken turned up documentation for old versions of vSphere and different products, nothing I thought was definitive
I have a user who is running a complicated mission-critical model on a VM that will take up to a week to run. In the meantime, there's been a predictive part failure on my storage array, and replacing the part will require that the array be shut down. It might take an hour or two.
The storage array hosts the VM datastore as well as some shared folders that the VM needs.
One of my ESXi 6.5 hosts has enough local storage to hold a few critical servers but not the machine this model runs on. I'll shut down most of the VMs and migrate the critical servers to the host before shutting down the array.
In order that my user not lose all of her work, I thought of suspending the machine before shutting down the array. As far as the model is concerned, it's just running on a Windows
I could try to hibernate Windows but suspending the machine seems better.. What is the likelihood that resuming the VM after having the datastore unavailable for a couple of hours will let Windows and the model pick up where they left off? Are there any pitfalls (e.g. persistent disks)?
