I need to take a copy of our production vCenter and run it in a lab for testing purposes.
This part isn't my strong point.How do I go about this and is there any official documentation pertaining to backing up and restoring vCenter 5.5?
I also plan on using this process (in the future) as my disaster recovery process if anything bad were to happen.
From my limited experience, do all I need to do is backup the SQL database and SSL certificates? How do I restore this in the Lab.
My vCenter 5.5 is on Server 2008R2 with a separate SQL 2008R2 server.
Regards
Best Answer
This article: (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2057353)
looks like it points towards what you need. Be careful with IP address assignment because if your prod environment has any connection to your test lab, it can assume that that is production and revert machines to whatever settings is in the lab (which will be older). Depending on whether you have applications that have time sensitive transactions, this can be inconvenient.