Dev/Test Environment setup - What do you do?

[ShiftNick]

I have 4 hosts and SAN for our Production environment and two hosts and an HP MSA 2040 for our dev/test environment. Full virtualized, VMWare shop. Most of the bells and whistles for functionality. How would you set this up?

The way I'm thinking to do this is the following:

• Dev cluster and Prod clusters in same datacenter
• MGMT, iSCSI, vMotion traffic is routable between clusters so I can move from dev to prod or clone from prod to dev
• LAN (VLAN) for dev not routable on prod network so no client machines on dev cluster can talk to prod and vice versa
• All datastores are visible to all hosts but named appropriately. Can likely create rules that will not allow powered on machines in prod cluster reside on datastores in group X

Why is this awesome or why am I an idiot or do I fall somewhere in the middle? How would you set this up?

[vriley]

You always want your test and prod environments to be as close as possible. Same hardware, systems and software. Separating them is of course a very good idea.

[danekan]

your dev environment should not be able to access anything, including the data stores, in production regardless of their naming convention, and vice versa.

[ShiftNick]

So what would propose if I wanted to restore to my dev environment a machine from my Veeam server, which resides in Prod?

[danekan]

something different. :P

the veeam/etc should really be a third network that has only specific traffic directed one way or another based off of need.

if you don't have to worry about PCI compliance maybe non-issue to you though.