On-Demand Sandbox

[jcwilsonmd]

Can someone please confirm for me how to leverage the On-Demand Sandbox

Is this just using the Sure Backup cabaility and leaving the VM on after the verification or is there some other way to configure and set this up

Any help is greatly appreciated

[Gostev]

You are 100% correct above. Leave it on, and do anything you want to it without affecting your production environments. Test OS and application patches, upgrades, various workarounds, database schema changes, permission changes, new group policy objects, potential security vulnerabilities etc. - naturally, huge amount of use cases there.

[jim3cantos]

You are 100% correct above. Leave it on, and do anything you want to it without affecting your production environments. Test OS and application patches, upgrades, various workarounds, database schema changes, permission changes, new group policy objects, potential security vulnerabilities etc. - naturally, huge amount of use cases there.

In case the testing is going to last for several weeks, is there any way to "protect" the surebackup job from shutting down accidentally and losing with it all the work done till that moment? It would be nice to be able to configure a "permanent" lab for testing not depending in a continously running surebackup job.

[dellock6]

Probably if you need to run a lab for quite some times, your best option is to restore the VMs with different parameters (name and IP address) and run them directly over vSphere as simple VMs. Not that Virtual Lab cannot run for long period of time, but remember it's anyway running directly from the backup file, so at least IOPS on the backup storage would be affected, and thus the backups you will run on it.

Luca.

[Gostev]

Agree. Just restore those VMs into the virtual lab, and keep enjoying the isolation at full I/O performance. Your SureBackup jobs WILL be shut down, if not accidentally - then when a backup job needs to open the involved backup file for write access.

[jim3cantos]

I was thinking about cloning virtual lab and testing vm while surebackup job is running to achieve the permanent lab. Just starting manually virtual lab, restoring testing vm and connecting it to virtual lab network should work? What about the "Updating virtual lab parameters" step that executes on testing vm in the surebackup job?

[Gostev]

From the top of my head, I do not see any issues with this approach... everything should still work.

[jim3cantos]

It works!

thanks.