asked on Sandbox tool recommendation
Looking for recommendations on Virtual Environment (Sandbox) for testing.
We have a VMWare 6.7 environment and use Veeam for Backups and Replication. I have never used either to establish a Sandbox to use for testing.
We are several Windows Server OS versions behind, especially since Windows 2022 is either coming our or is already out.
We have Windows 2008R2, Windows server 2012r2 and Windows 2016 servers in our production environment.
I would like to create a Sandbox to move copies/backups into and upgrade all to Windows Server 2019. Because our production environment has a blend of 32 and 64bit applications, I would like to upgrade and test before we attempt to upgrade our Production environment.
So I am looking for recommendations on what tool to use, i.e. VMWare, Veeam, or a different tool.
Since I have little experience doing this, I wasn't sure if we just clone our production servers and import them into a test environment or use Veeam to start up backup copies of our production servers
Looking for what process/product would most easily work for this testing.
Basically, we use some third-party applications for reporting, HTTL functionality, and PDF generation in our software. These are necessary for software functionality. They are 32Bit applications. I don't want to try and upgrade our production environment, just to discover incompatibilities with these accessory tools that would affect production. It seems like a better plan would be to isolate clones/copies of our infrastructure, turn them up and verify we haven't incurred application failures or system performance issues on the new OS's.
Veeam Virtual Labs & SureBackup | PeteNetLive
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For example, with Site/App/API I just clone a container (I use LXD), which takes a few minutes, then generate a new cert + rename the host to dev, so for foo.com hostname becomes dev.foo.com or any random hostname.
How exactly your... arrange your testing... depends on exactly what you're testing...