Test Environment at work

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How do you guys have your test environment setup at work? i.e DC's, File Servers, Exchange, SQL, etc.. Do you have on a separate LAN/VLAN? with no communication with prod?

I am looking to set this up, I would appreciate some pointers

Last thing I need is my test environment affecting Production!

 

Test environment? Whats one of them then?

The approach here has always been 'Just try it, whats the worst that can happen?' one day the worst will happen and they'll find out but that'll be after I'm out the door!

 

At the moment ours is like Joshia's - non-existent but we've just got a second box to fire some more VM's on to so we'll be setting it up in the coming months, I'd expect a SBS box, a couple of additional DC's / service boxes, additional Exchange server and the usual culprits for clients, 2k, XP, Vista, 7 if I get my fingers in to the pie.

 

I am thinking of creating a vlan and separate it from the current network... I would then Setup DC, DHCP, DNS, Exchange, etc...

 

Virtualised? Sandboxed?

Ideally you actually want three different environments but the chances of that are quite small, my current environment at work is my laptop with Hyper-V on it running what I deem to be required.

A Dev, Pre-prod and Production. Each 'should' have a replica of the main components of the Prod environment (a p2v of your DC, SQL\DB environments, Messaging etc). It depends on what you want to test, if it's SCCM for example then the virtualised environment is idea because you can simulate the entire thing quite well.

 

Agree... for the most part though I would just have it setup for internal use only. I would like to be able to do things like testing exchange db restores, when I do AD prep work, etc.. I would ideally want to do it in a test environment making sure all goes well... Things that can really screw up a network should be done somewhere else first. I've been getting around so far with a home lab, but it's got to a point where it's not convenient so I need to get this resolved once and for all...

I will be ordering 2 clone workstations that are compatible with VMware's ESXi, put them in a cluster and install things like AD, DHCP, DNS, File Server, test vm's, etc... then get a separate Exchange and SQL servers running in a non virtual environment.

 

I agree with this as well... for in house development that we do with C# we have a dev, test, and prod environments, etc... however unfortunately we don't have any test or dev environment for our network, even when I first started we did not have a test environment.

 

Our dev and test environments are both on the guy who does the developments box.... methinks that may have to change when my 'replacement' starts (the company have decided to go fo a dev whose willing to fix the on printer and rely on our outsourcing outfit for most of the support... Not the best option in my opinion but I'm not going to be here!)

The network side of things has always been far more 'suck it and see', a test environment wasn't even a vague possibility until recently and its still very unlikely to ever actually happen unless there's a major change. With a limited budget all the money goes into the production environment rather than a stable test bed.

 

My testing rig is at home. Like a lot of places I've worked they have never had a testing environment.

 

We have 3 ML110 G6 Servers with 16GB Ram in each for Test/Dev

 

Some of my customers have enough cash to purchase physical servers for their Dev and QA environments, that mimic the Production environment. Quite important when you want to test FIM 2010 code due to the implications it can have of being connected to multiple environments (ADAM/AD LDS/AD, Notes/Exchange, SAP, SQL, etc...). One mistake and boom goes an environment. So with this being replicated in Dev and QA, they get to do plenty of pre-testing before going to Prod. Also good for testing patches.

But really, that's only possible in massive companies. Smaller ones with just a few thousand users (max) may di a much simpler one, often virtualized.

In any case, a test environment is good. Just implementing it in production and calling it a day without any testing will result in situations such as the kind I've seen where a company had to reinstall their AD environment 3 times because they just didn't figure out the best way of doing things. tsk tsk

 

Wooh! I wonder what they were thinking about three times in a role, and no one got into trouble as well I suppose.

This firm would be a good candidate to send all of it's IT staff on a five days ITIL v3 foundation training.