Hi,

We have Sharepoint 2010 farm with 2 web vm servers, 2 app vm servers and database vm server.

Servers are: WFE1, WFE2, APP1, APP2, SQL1

URLs:
http://intranet.company.local,
http://mysite.company.local

We doing full SharePoint backup through Central Administration and full SQL database backup through SSMS.

We would like to create as much as possible identical test environment on the same network with same Active Directory Service accounts. In that case server names and URLs will be different:

Servers will be: DevWFE1, DevWFE2, DevAPP1, DevAPP2, DevSQL1

URLs:
http://devintranet.company.local
http://devmysite.company.local

Could you please advise the best way of creating the development farm:

1. Create and configure new VMs with different host names.
2. Create new SharePoint 2010 farm.
    Should we configure same database names for Admin and Config databases as we want to remain same naming for all databases?
3. Restore all databases from live to new SQL server.
4. Run full restore of SharePoint 2010 farm through Central Administration with new Web Application URLs:
    http://devintranet.company.local
    http://devmysite.company.local

Is this the correct way to creating test environment from live? Any links with correct steps?

Thanks

• Edited by jori5 Thursday, June 19, 2014 2:53 PM

i would prefer the SQL Backups method.

1. Create and Configure new dev SharePoint farm(same build level as Production)
2. create and configure the services application(same as in production)
3. create and configure web application in dev( same as production, in terms of authentication etc)
4. deploy all the custom solutions or custom configuration if applied to Prod.
5. now restore the Production Content Database into Dev SQL server
6. Mount the content db accordingly
7. Run full search crawl.

Thanks Waqas,

and where in these steps should be rename of Web applications?

Step 3, create the web applications with the dev/test versions of the names.