VirtualLab and permanent virtual machines

[sandsturm]

Hi

We want to create a virtualLab as a copy of some of our productive virtual machines. The lab should reflect the productive network topology as well. All VLAN's are separated by a physical firewall from each other. Our idea is, to install a virtual machine as a virtual firewall and create a process to copy the firewallruleset from production to this virtual machine. In this case, this virtual firewall VM runs permanently for this lab and just the virtual machines from production are created from backup in this virtualLab environment from time to time. Is such an idea possible to have VMs permanently running and some VMs are created from the VirtualLab environment on demand? I can't iamgine, that this will work, because portgroups are created during the creation of the virutal lab, if I'am right? Am I able to connect this firewall VM to this VirtualLab portgroups to have the network environment up and running, because this firewall will do the routing as well.
I hope, my questions are clear enough?

thx and regards
sandsturm

[foggy]

This looks possible, since virtual lab is not something that is created each time when SureBackup runs, it is created once and then used by SureBackup jobs to fire up VMs inside it.