Replicating production into a dev/test environment

[jconry]

Hi guys,

I'm looking to get some advice/comments from people who have replicated production environments into a vmware dev/test environment. Specifically with DC's and SMS. My dev/test environment will be physically seperate from production so there's no link between the two environments, however I can temporarily switch some patching around just for the purposes of cloning and data transfer.

I have a vm DC in production at the moment, so there's no problem cloning that and bringing it in dev, however is this going to require masses of metadata clean up to get it functioning properly given that it will have objects in AD that don't technically exist anymore?

The same goes for SMS, if I clone the master SMS server into dev, how is this going to react? Can I just easily delete the now non-existent objects and replication partners etc?

Lastly, would it be more practical if I just create a new domain from scratch and try to mimic what I can from production?

That's about it for now. Thanks in advance.

[chaz112182]

hello,

i just went through this process and it was pretty pain free. i didn't have a DC vm in production so i created a new vm and ran DCPROMO. once that was done i used vmware converter to bring the DC into my lab environment. i turned on the DC in lab ran metadata cleanup (didn't take to long) and bam i had a replica of my production domain in the lab. i am using my lab to test migration from exchange 2003 to exchange 2007. hope that helps !

[jconry]

Thanks for that, you make it sound so easy. I'm going to give it a try next week.

I'm still a bit worried about SMS though, mainly because the db is so big.