Clone of production environment for tests in VMware
I'm trying to find a way to make a quick copy of a large number of virtual machines in order to use them to test new features for a productive environment.
For example, the VMware has a product "Site Recovery Manager". There is the possibility of creating a test environment for virtual machines, using the "Recovery Plan Testing". In a few minutes the system launches snapshot from second physical storage and creates a complete copy of all virtual machines, with VLANs in VRF, starting them and listen for heartbeat.
But this is not the best idea, use this option for long-term use of the test environment as a lab environment. Sadly.
Is there such a product or solution that will allow to clone a large number of virtual machines (> 2TB) in an up-to-date state for carrying out tests in an isolated environment?
My conf:
2 vCenter 6.5.1 in Linked-mode.
2 storages with vmware SRA compatibility.
2 different clusters.
If your storage system supports ROW or COW snapshots that can be mounted R/W, that would be one great option. You could instantly "clone" an entire LUN at a time and to refresh you test environment, just blow away the snapshot mount and mount the latest snapshot. You still need to provide your own network solution. I would normally have a second VMware stack that has identical (or close to) configs and put the VM vLANs behind a PAT (port address translation). Test and Prod should not communicate anyway and this minimizes the required changes to prod in order to support test.