Building QA Environment - Mirror of Production

[Matthew Berry]

Technologies: ICM 7.1 SR5, CCM 4.1.3 SR4D, CRS 3.5.3, Unity 4.2(1), McAfee 8.5

Scenario: Mid-sized business is building a QA environment that would function as a functional mirror of the production system. We would need the mirroring as much as possible:

- ICM scripts

- ICM configurations

- IVR scripts

- CallManager configurations

- Unity configurations

- Unity mailboxes

Has anyone had experience building a nearly-mirror image system?

Some questions that arise:

- How to keep the two systems in sync, while preserving unique information between both systems (i.e. server names, IPs, etc.)

- Is there documentation on deploying this type of solution?

- Has anyone done anything like this before and, if so, what were the challenges?

We are not building a development environment. Otherwise, we would have built a "dumbed-down" version. This must be as closely mirrored as possible.

[gpulos · Accepted solution]

I've built an entire 'mirror' of my production CCM clusters, ICM cluster, IVR cluster and Unity failover in my lab.

I use them not as a functional mirror but as the testing grounds for updates, upgrades and changes to all of the system components mentioned.

The toughest part IS keeping configuration/data information in sync between the production and lab systems.

I do not allow production network to communicate with my lab so some manual moving of data & configuration is needed to keep systems in 'sync'.

(since i do not allow the networks to communicate with each other, it makes it easier to have the same system names, IP addy's, etc.)

With ICM/IVR, it is pretty simple. Do the configuration on the lab systems and then only copy IVR and ICM scripts from production.

With CCM, a BARS backup is my best way to keep data/configuration updated between my production clusters and my lab clusters.

Unity can use DiRT for virtually the same process as the CCMs; backing up data and restoring to the lab system.

This may be a feasible way for you to meet your needs.