Mirrow Production PWA to TEST PWA

[Ivor Davies]

It was identified in one of my team meetings yesterday that wewould like to
mirror / replicate our PRODUCTION environment in TEST – including all errors
and issues, with the thought that it is an EXACT copy / duplicate of
PRODUCTION.

I know that I can do a FARM backup in CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION on the
PRODUCTION box, but will this copy everything EXACTLY to TEST, or would I
need to perform an IMAGE backup of the PRODUCTION PWA web server and RESTORE
in to TEST server?

Do you know how I could facilitate this?

I would appreciate any feedback that you may have.

Thank You.

Ivor

 

[Gary Chefetz]

Ivor:

If you can live without the Project Workspace content, you can do this by
restoring the Project Server databases on the test system. The Farm backup
and restore method works, as does imaging. Acronis' Echo Server creates
image backups and provides a tool to convert the image to a VHD. It's pretty
slick, and I'm a big fan of imaging in general.

Microsoft's Brian Smith wrote the consummate article series on this topic
starting at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brismith/arch...ving-a-copy-of-production-to-test-part-1.aspx

You should definitely review this series.

 

[Ivor Davies]

Thanks Gary for the quick response!

Yes...I did try the FARM backup and restore in Central Admin - this created
a wonderful copy of PRODUCTION, but alas without the SSP synchronization
errors that we are currently experiencing in PRODUCTION.

We do use Acronis here - so I suppose I could image the PRODUCTION web
server and save it to a VHD file (since our TEST machines are virtual servers
anyway). All that I would need to do is get our server folks to rename the
server to what it should be in the TEST environment. But before I do this I
want to copy / backup the existing VHD files just in case I need to restore
TEST to the way it was.

I will have a look at the restore to VHD in Acronis - thanks so much again!

Take Care...

Ivor