Creating a replica of a server for testing

Question

Hi All,

I have a project in hand and can't find the best way to approach it.

We have Jira and Conf servers in our Azure, and I was recently asked to replicate them and use the replicas for testing.
I restored one of them from a backup to a new VM, but that caused our service to just start using the new VM I created.
I'm not sure if there is any easier way to do this without interrupting the primary VM? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

What stands out to me the most here is that your service switched over to the new VM. What is pointing your users to the new VM? Are you using reverse proxies, gateways, load balancers, containers...etc?

This is a good start to get an idea for creating a test environment:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/creating-a-test-environment-for-jira-966063324.html

When I made test environments for our Atlassian stack, I made sure that they were on separate networks than the production servers. So, for Azure I would place these VMs in a seperate VNET.

Answer 2

Yes and I think that's the part I might need clarification on. I followed the steps to restore the running VM to a new VM, thinking that would give me a copy of the current VM and I would use that new one for testing, but it not only replicated the software but also replicated the NIC and the C-Name to the new machine and the only thing changed was the IP address, as a result our AD started talking to the new machine since it had the same name and when I turned it off temporarily the Confluence page stopped working!

All I wanted to do was get a copy of the VMs for Jira and Conf from their latest backup, put them in a Test Vnet and start working on the test machines and try things we need before implementing them on our Production VMs. Now I'm kinda lost!!