Best Practice Question: setting up a Test Environment

[Kelly]

Hi All - A quick Best Practices question here...

I'm writing requirements doc and network plan to set up a Test
Environment which should be a mirror copy of our Production
Environment (MS 10.1 SP2 w/SQL)

We still have RedDot servers in place that were used as our Test Bed a
few months ago when we upgraded Production to 10. So there is
hardware already available with the current server version installed
that I need and most (hopefully all) the folder permissions set up
correctly across the server.

I’m just not entirely sure if it is better to simply just upgrade the
projects on my Test Servers from a backup of our Production Server. Or
if it's better to re-image these Test servers entirely from our
current Production Servers.

Thoughts? Reasons why 1 method might be better than the other??

Many Thanks!
Kelly

[Jian Huang]

Hi Kelly,

I would recommend simply exporting the PROD project and importing onto the DEV server.

When it comes to CMS and PROD/DEV planning, I have a couple of other suggestions.

1.  Have 1 CMS environment, the project has a PROD and DEV project variants.  This way, a developer can freely do DEV work in DEV variant using the latest content data without worrying about content migration/sync.

2.  Have 1 CMS cluster, but 2 servers in this cluster, one for PROD and one for DEV.  Have a PROD project, when a DEV project is needed, make a copy from PROD project.  When doing server intensive DEV work, use the DEV server of the cluster, so crashing that server would not crash PROD server.

The con of this 2 approaches is that only 1 license key, which may not have enough SmartTree license to support all user activities.

-Jian