A client of mine is in need of an integration and test lab environment to represent production. The production system is 90% virtual, running vCenter / ESXi 5.0. There are approximately 500 VMs, predominantly Windows Server 2008 R2 systems running a variety of applications. SQL Server 2008 and IIS are in use heavily. Requirements dictate that the lab environment run on a separate instance of vCenter, physically separate from production. It's also a requirement that the lab systems belong to a separate domain, with alternate IP and server name configurations. There are approximately 500 VMs running in production that need to be consistently represented in the lab to facilitate reliable end-to-end and load testing. My current plan is to:
- Backup the production VM's using Veeam Backup and Replication 6.5.
- Import the backups into the new test environment.
- Disjoin the systems from the original production domain(s).
- Re-name and re-ip.
- Add the systems to the new domain(s).
- Cross my fingers....
I don't have a very high confidence level that this process will work and it's still under debate whether the plan will garner security approval. Looking for alternative methods of duplicating production systems into a lab environment considering the requirements.