I don’t normally promote things. But, after working with this tool called UMove, I thought it might be cool to share.
That being said, what process would one normally go through to build an exact replica of a production Active Directory forest in a lab environment? Hands shoot up! Yes, you… the big threatening looking guy in the back. Any of the following might be done to complete this task:
- Perform a restore of a DC on exactly the same hardware.
- Use convoluted steps to restore a DC onto different hardware.
- dcpromo a machine and then rip it out of the domain.
- If you built your DCs on a mirror set rip one of the drives out (provided the hardware is the same).
- …
Most likely I’m missing other options, but it’s late. Anyhow, the point being is that completing this task can be very painful and not something that brings joy one’s life. With UMove, based on my testing so far, replicating an existing DC into a lab environment is fairly easy. In our case, we have been just taking full backups of DCs and then using UMove to restore those DCs onto VMs. Like magic, we then have a copy of the forest ready to perform run tests on.
But, if you happened to have built your DCs on a VM to start with, you could also just copy the vhd over to the lab. However, be for warned: ********DO NOT PLUG THESE MACHINES BACK ONTO YOUR PRODUCTION NETWORK******** Bad things will ensue.
BTW – I’m still getting a number of comments concerning my validation fun from last week. I fully intend to reply to these comments. In fact, I really want to reply to ones I got today, as it is about a really good topic. But, I will save that for this weekend when I can think strait again.
