Production to lab clone - down and dirty (Full Version)

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Scott Lowe -> Production to lab clone - down and dirty (31.Jan.2011 12:26:02 AM)

I recently needed to copy our SharePoint 2007 environment to a lab for some testing. So, I did the following:

  • Used VMware vConverter to copy the running physical SharePoint server and database to virtual machines
  • Cloned a virtual machine-based domain controller
  • Disconnected network adapters from each new virtual machine
  • Provided the three new VMs with IP addresses isolated from the production network
  • Made necessary DNS changes on the newly copied virtual domain controllers
  • Re-connected the virtual network adapters inside each virtual machine
  • Powered on the new virtual machines
  • Handed the infrastructure off to my SharePoint admin so that she could do some testing without affecting the production environment



Scott Lowe -> RE: Production to lab clone - down and dirty (31.Jan.2011 9:52:35 PM)

All,

Here is a blog posting that I wrote to explain in a little more detail what we did to create our lab environment.

http://blogs.virtualizationadmin.com/lowe/2011/01/31/creating-a-lab-on-a-budget/

Scott



renntiger -> RE: Production to lab clone - down and dirty (8.Feb.2011 3:51:15 PM)

I just came across this forum while looking for information on VM cloning. I need to be able to clone multiple VMs on a regular basis, and was recently given a trial version of Instavia's dBeamer to test. Everything seemed to work and I was able to make VM clones and instantly power them up. Has anyone here played with it? What was your experience?

Thanks



Scott Lowe -> RE: Production to lab clone - down and dirty (23.Feb.2011 12:21:22 AM)

Renntiger -

I've heard of this product but don't have much knowledge of it. However, as much a fan as I am of virtualization, I'm just as big a fan of DPM and see that they have a DPM version; I need to try it out.

Have you run into any issues with the cloning at all? Are you intending to run both the old and the cloned VMs side by side in production for any reason?

Scott



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