With the release of SQL Server 2012, testing DR is a dream. The "always on" works great allowing us to switch over between data centers in less than a minute. We probably switch between data centers on a biweekly basis. It's really fantastic having DR totally hands off. It was a little bit of extra effort and script writing to have the SQL Jobs work seamlessly, but in the end it was worth it.

Prior to migrating to SQL 2012 from SQL 2005, we were log shipping and that was a real pain and took more manual intervention than we would like. The downtime in this scenario would have been a couple of hours.

Steve