Once upon a time, if you said to someone “do you have a test environment?” there was at least a 70 to 80% chance that the answer would be one of the following:
- Only some very old systems that we decommissioned from production years ago
- No, management say it’s too expensive
I’d like to suggest that these days, with virtualisation so easy, there are few reasons why the average site can’t have a reasonably well configured backup and recovery test environment. This would allow the following sorts of tests could be readily conducted:
- Disaster recovery of hosts and databases
- Disaster recovery of the backup server
- Testing new versions of operating systems, databases and applications with the backup software
- Testing new versions of the backup software
Focusing on the Intel/x86/x86_64 world, we see where this is immediately achievable. Remember, for the average set of tests that you run, speed is not necessarily going to be the issue. Let’s focus on non-speed functionality testing, and think of what would be required to have a test environment that would suit many businesses, regardless of size:
- Virtualisation server – obviously VMware ESXi springs to mind here, if cost is a driving factor.
- Cheap storage – if performance is not an issue for testing (i.e., you’re after functionality not speed testing), there’s no reason why you can’t use cheap storage. A few 2TB SATA drives in a RAID-5 configuration will give you oodles of space if you need any level of redundancy, or just in a RAID-0 stripe will give you capacity and performance. Optionally present storage via iSCSI if its available.
- Tiny footprint – previously test environments were disqualified in a lot of organisations, particularly those at locations where space was at a premium. Allocating room for say, 15 machines to simulate part of the production network took up tangible space – particularly when it was common for test environments to not be built using rackable equipment.
In the 2000’s, much excitement was heralded over the notion of supercomputers at your desk – for example, remember when Orion released a 96-CPU capable system? The notion of that much CPU horsepower under your desk for single tasks may be appealing to some, but let’s look at more practical applications flowing from multi-core/multi-CPU systems – a mini datacentre under your desk. Or in that spare cubicle. Or just in a 3U rack enclosure somewhere within your datacentre itself.
Gone are the days when backup and recovery test environments are cost prohibitive. You’re from a small organisation? Maybe 10-20 production servers at most? Well that simply means your requirements will be smaller and you can probably get away with just VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, Parallels or VirtualBox running on a suitably powerful desktop machine.
For companies already running virtualised environments, it’s more than likely the case that you can even use a production virtualisation server due for replacement as a host to the test environment, so long as it can still virtualise a subset of the production systems you’d need to test with. During budgetary planning this can make the process even more painless.
This sort of test environment obviously doesn’t suit every single organisation or every single test requirement – however, no single solution ever does. If it does suit your organisation though, it can remove a lot of the traditional objections to dedicated test environments.