Creating Test AD environment from Production AD environment

[Bill]

To all,

What would be the best way to create a test AD environment from our
production AD environment? I'm a little leary of putting another DC
on our production environment, pulling it off the network, and
cleaning up the AD. I've also read about doing a system state restore
of AD on the test box. What are the pros and cons? Which method would
be recommended?

Thanks in advance,

Bill

 

[Robbie Allen]

It is a very tedious process to pull a DC out of a forest and try to create
a test forest using it as a seed - even if using a system state restore.
You have to be extremely careful that the DC never contacts the production
DCs or it could cause problems. Also, when the DC comes up for the first
time, it tries to make contact with its replication partners, FSMOs, etc and
you have to manually reconfigure all of that.

I heard that MS took this approach while testing the Windows Server 2003
upgrade (Windows .NET at the time) and were supposedly going to write a
paper detailing how it can be done. I'm not sure if that was every
completed/published.

I use VMWare for most of my testing and it has worked very well for
simulating several domains on a single host.

Robbie Allen
http://www.rallenhome.com/