{"id":5057,"date":"2014-02-09T10:37:52","date_gmt":"2014-02-09T00:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5057"},"modified":"2014-02-09T10:37:52","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T00:37:52","slug":"what-is-your-test-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2014\/02\/09\/what-is-your-test-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s your test environment?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While virtualisation has introduced additional complexities into our lives from a backup perspective, you can’t argue with the benefits it has brought.<\/p>\n

A decade or more ago when I’d talk to customers about\u00a0test<\/em> environments for backups, I’d usually get a slightly shocked response. It was one thing to spend money on backup infrastructure, but spending it on\u00a0test<\/em> backup infrastructure seemed to many like I’d descended into madness.<\/p>\n

Yet just like any other aspect of production systems, a backup environment is something you need to be able to test. At minimum you need to be able to test:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. New backup scenarios.<\/li>\n
  2. New recovery scenarios.<\/li>\n
  3. Upgrades.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In the above, I’m\u00a0not<\/em> referencing your normal testing (periodic recoveries, media verification, etc.) That sort of testing goes without saying, and for the most part will operate using your production backups.<\/p>\n

    As a backup administrator though, you’ll periodically need to conduct tests that don’t interfere with the production backup environment. Sometimes if you’re in a big enough organisation you may very well have some physical hardware to do that on (e.g., previous generation models of libraries or storage that have been decommissioned and replaced). For the most part, you’ll likely be resorting to a virtualised environment.<\/p>\n

    So, what do\u00a0you have\u00a0<\/em>to do that sort of testing on? What’s your backup test lab look like?<\/p>\n

    Here’s mine:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • Backup server running CentOS Linux 5.6, with 256GB VTL capacity and 512GB AFTD capacity<\/li>\n
    • Storage node running CentOS Linux 5.6, 128GB VTL and 128GB AFTD capacity<\/li>\n
    • 4 x Linux Virtual Machine clients with around 20GB occupied capacity each;<\/li>\n
    • 8 x Linux Virtual Machine clients with around 6GB of occupied capacity each (base OS only);<\/li>\n
    • 1 x Linux Virtual Machine with ~100GB capacity and 1,000,000 files;<\/li>\n
    • 1 x Linux Virtual Machine running Oracle 11 ;<\/li>\n
    • As required:\n
        \n
      • Windows 2012 storage node in eval mode;<\/li>\n
      • Windows 2012 clients in eval mode<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        That’s Linux top-heavy of course, but I don’t have access to a Microsoft volume license or anything that makes deployment of a lot of Windows VMs easy (and legal). Not all VMs are ever active at once \u2013 generally speaking at most I’ll have 12-16 running at any point, and that’ll depend on which ones are running. The basic Linux clients are usually configured with just 128MB of RAM so it’s easy to have all 12 running at once. The Linux machine running Oracle on the other hand needs 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM, so it tends to hog resources a bit more.<\/p>\n

        Overall it’s not meant to be about providing super-quick performance, just a testing platform.<\/p>\n

        New NetWorker versions?\u00a0NetWorker upgrade techniques?\u00a0NetWorker disaster recovery testing?\u00a0NetWorker platform migrations?\u00a0They’re the sort of things I use my virtual lab to test with.<\/p>\n

        What’s your virtual backup lab? And what do you test in it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        While virtualisation has introduced additional complexities into our lives from a backup perspective, you can’t argue with the benefits it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[517,994],"class_list":["post-5057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","tag-lab","tag-testing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1jz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5057"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5060,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5057\/revisions\/5060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}