Clone vm with oracle DB installed as testsystem

[agrob]

Hello

Not sure if i'm right here but i'll give it a try.

We have a windows server 2012 with oracle db installed. server is productive and we backup it with veeam backup and replication v8. the idea is now to "clone" the productive server and use it as testsystem. Because we have it on a veeam backup i thought about doing the following:

1. Restore the Oracle DB server with a new name and set the nic as disconnected
2. Boot restored server and change its hostname and join it to a workgroup (because nic is disconnected this should not affect productive system)
3. After reboot, change IP address and rejoin the server with new name to the same domain as before.
4. Oracle Admins have to check the DB and maybe have to do some additional steps...

My concern is: join it to the domain with a new hostname should result in a new "domain sid" for this server. But it does not in general create a new sid on the server itself. But is that a problem nowadays? I'm not sure if i should run sysprep after step one described above. but i think if i sysprep, it messes up oracle installation completely.

has anybody here done something similar before?
Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Andre,

Have you considered using on-demand sandbox functionality that we provide as a part of SureBackup job instead the process mentioned above?

In this case you don't need to deal with all that complexity and you will always have the latest version of your production server to run the tests against.

Thanks!

[agrob]

Hi Vitaliy

Thanks for your feedback.
I thought about that. But the "test" system is also used for development so all the needed vms (dc, frontend, db, etc) has to be run nearly 7x24 in this sandbox and i think this is not suitable.

Best Regards
Andre

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, thanks for clarification. Since you need these systems 24 by 7, you can still leverage our appliance (virtual lab) to isolate production network from replica VMs. For example, you can backup the entire infrastructure, then restore it to the spare ESXi host and connect these VMs to the network configured by our virtual lab. Please be aware that our lab allows accessing backed up VMs via masquerade IP address from production infrastructure, so that there is no need to remove these VMs from the domain and change their IP address/hostnames.

[agrob]

Thanks Vitaliy i'll think about that.
It would still be interessting if the other approach would work with rename and rejoin to domain without sysprep... so if anyone has some infos about that would be much appreciated!
Thanks