copy of production 2007 environment...for testing?

[Jesse]

I have a Project Server 2007 instance in production. I would like to be able
to create a copy of production (on demand) and restore onto another Project
Server 2007 instance to be able to test with. I’m thinking that I can
install a new single server instance of Project Server 2007 to copy
production data to.

Does this make sense what I’m trying to accomplish? What is the best and/or
easiest way to accomplish this? I may want to take a snapshot of production
periodically to test with current data.

Thanks, Jesse

 

[Marc Soester [MVP]]

Hi Jesse,

under normal cycumsdances you would be able to move your production in a
test environment. unfortunatly some things will break ( e.g. WSS notification
service).

You can move your workspace changes by applying the stp file to your test
environment, but will need to manually update your custom fields and resource
data.
Hope this helps

 

[bkahler]

FYI: I have discovered an easy way to move production project setups and
System settings to a testing server.
Seems to work welll.
Steps
1. Do an adminitraive backup on the Production server of everything you want
to transfer. (this puts the backups in the ProjectServer_Archive Database.)
2. Backup the produciton ProjectServer_Archive database and restore it to
the testing server (rename or replace the existing ProjectServer_Archive
database)

Now you can use the Adminitrative restore to restore anything from the
Production Servers Archive to testing.
The only caveats I found were...
1. The Web access sites need to have the same extended url
i.e If Production is http://ProdServer/pwa testing must be
http://TestingServer2/pwa
2. The SQL Collation settings on the SQL servers must be the same.

Hope this helps someone.

--bkahler

 

[Didier Maignan - Interprojet]

Hi bkahler

This sounds great, but what about documents, issues or risk ? I can't see
how this would back them into the second server, but I may be wrong, did you
checked this ?


--
Didier Maignan
EPM partner
http://www.interprojet.com

 

[Andre Venter]

Didier,

You are right in saying that no risks or issues will be move this way. These
items are stored in the wss_config DB . As far as the custom fields goes the
below mentioned way should work even though i have experinced some problems
with the reporting DB after creating another instance.
Another thing i found was to first create a blank new instance with empty
DB's and then later restore your 5 DB's to that environment.