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totalenginesupp
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Contributor

Test Environment

Hello,

We are looking to create a test environment which will be segregated from our live production environment. Our live Production environment is currently using ESX 3.5 Update 4 with Virtual Center 2.5. We have 2 ESX Hosts and 1 Dell PS5000X Equallogic SAN Housing our Servers and Data.

We have a Dell 2950 which we plan on utilising for our test environment using ESX 4 Essentials using the local disk storage. I have no experience of setting this up and would like any pointers to ensure we make a success of it.

Our plan is to build the ESX 4 Host and to restore VM using backup exec. I want to ensure network isolation as we would like to restore the Domain Controllers and Exchange for testing purposes with the ability to access the internet and our Sophos ES1000 email appliances if possible without interacting with the live production environment.

Any assistance, links to guides, recommended practices etc are very welcome in aiding us to achieve this goal.

Thanks for reading,

Andy

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totalenginesupp
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Been re-thinking and what we are trying to achieve is simply have a test environment isolated from main network that we can restore VMs to and mess with. Internet connectivity would be a plus if possible.

An example would be to restore the DCs and exchange and then build a new 2007 exchange box and ensure it doesnt mess up AD.

I believe I need to place all the VMs onto a seperate subnet compared to the production environment and these vms are all on a virtual switch that has no physical nics bound to it. I believe this will ensure no cross talk from Test to Production.

I believe if I add a linux based router/firewall to this setup I can get the VMs on the test environment to have internet access. An example would be this

I believe the above is the correct method but would like some verification on this, but will probably know the answer by end of week.

Anyone have any experience in this area?

Andy

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totalenginesupp
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Hello,

ok job a good one, we have managed to get this sorted. Here are the steps I took.

Installed ESX 4.0 into a Dell PowerEdge 2950

Setup a Virtual Switch with no physical NICs (for VMs to be seperate from Production Network)

Setup and Configured Vyatta Virtual Router to allow the VMs access to the internet

Setup TESTESX in Symantec Backup Exec, Job Setup

Restored VM from tape to TESTESX

Andy

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