Virtual Test Lab/Environment (OT?)

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1

A test environment is all about testing functionality.

 

I always suggest and implement a new installation for a test environment (same for a development environment) this then gives multiple positive tests for the IT team as a whole to make sure that they understand the installation, but also to make sure that you are capable of recovering from a total system failure if you needed to.

 

I am not a big fan of the P2V for a test or dev environment because you will need to change the machine name and that is really annoying to get all the right config files changed to point to the new install over the old install, unless you keep it on a completely different network with different DNS etc, which just adds unneeded complexity in my opinion.

 

Build it in a VM for sure, functionality is the purpose of testing, performance is what you save for the production system. I also think the cost and overhead needed to supply all the other components to a completely segregated network just isn’t worth the time, effort, and cost to do all that and maintain it when there are usually a lot of other things that people would want to be spending their time and money working on since pretty much all of us never have the time we need to get everything done.

 

From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of ygroups.adamleer@...
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 12:07 PM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] Virtual Test Lab/Environment (OT?)

 



We are going to attempt a minor upgrade to Epicor (9.05.700C to 703 hopefully) and then sometime in the next few years we want to be able to upgrade to E10. Our current setup is almost entirely VMWare virtual servers, with the exception of our Epicor server, which is one physical box for app servers and SQL database on a big FusionIO SSD drive.

 

My question is, has anyone successfully created a test environment for a setup like this?  I'm assuming a P2V  (physical to virtual) could be run on our physical Epicor server, and then a virtual lab of sorts could be setup for that and any other servers we need (e.g. the virtual server Service Connect runs on, the Active Directory server, etc).  We are looking into Veeam Virtual Labs / On-Demand Sandboxing as an option. It costs a little bit more for the enterprise edition, but looks like it would do exactly what we want.  Has anyone ever had success using that with an Epicor test environment?  

 

 

Thanks,

Adam

 

 




2
We are going to attempt a minor upgrade to Epicor (9.05.700C to 703 hopefully) and then sometime in the next few years we want to be able to upgrade to E10. Our current setup is almost entirely VMWare virtual servers, with the exception of our Epicor server, which is one physical box for app servers and SQL database on a big FusionIO SSD drive.

My question is, has anyone successfully created a test environment for a setup like this?  I'm assuming a P2V  (physical to virtual) could be run on our physical Epicor server, and then a virtual lab of sorts could be setup for that and any other servers we need (e.g. the virtual server Service Connect runs on, the Active Directory server, etc).  We are looking into Veeam Virtual Labs / On-Demand Sandboxing as an option. It costs a little bit more for the enterprise edition, but looks like it would do exactly what we want.  Has anyone ever had success using that with an Epicor test environment?  


Thanks,
Adam


3
Hi,
On Epicors advisement we went from HyperV to physical (app serv and sql on one box).  Basically this was reinstall apart from the database which we restored from our SQL VM to SQL physical box.

For our test environement we kept our test VM and SQL VM, now we just perform a restore live to test or live to pilot when we need. Of course there are a few steps you need to before you start using it (reconfig of system agent, recompile Bpms etc.)

So whilst we are not using VEEAM or FusionI/O we do have one big fat box running SQL and app servers.

I did perform a test upgrade from 606a to 701 on our test environment and that worked ok.  I'm waiting for 703 to give that a trial and see how much work will be involved in upgrading.

Cheers.
Simon Hall