Refreshing lower environment with production data

[DavidHettlinger]

We're looking to upgrade our RSA Authentication Manager installation (from 8.1 SP 1 likely to 8.3).  Our test environment has been neglected for some time, and before we upgrade the production environment, we want to make test resemble production.  Is there an efficient and safe way to do this?  Is there a way to bulk-copy (most of) the data from our production env. down to the test env. (without creating new issues)?  (I'm familiar with doing this on the identity governance side but don't have familiarity with this for MFA tools.)

[SGTech · Accepted solution]

Hi David Hettlinger,

What is your test environment version is it same as primary (8.1 SP1)? if yes you can take backup of your primary and restore it in to your test environment.

is it Physical appliance or Virtual?

After restoration success full in test environment, you can start upgrade your primary to 8.3, upgrade path as below:

8.1 SP1 > 8.2 > 8.2 SP1 > 8.3

Take backup of each step and also after you successfully upgrade to 8.3.

 if any thing goes wrong during upgrade you can reset factory your appliance and load the version which you have take backup earlier and restore it. For Virtual appliance create new Virtual instance and restore it.

Take note restoration will delete your all replica in your environment, you have to build replica and attach it to primary in the instance of restoration required.

Hope this helps

Thanks

Rajesh Gogineni [M.Tech Products Pte Ltd]

[DavidHettlinger]

Thanks, Rajesh.  Yes, our test and production environments are on the same version.  And our test environment uses a virtual appliance.  I'll look into using a back-up of our production primary to restore down to test.  If you (or anyone else) have any other cautions (particularly to avoid causing trouble with production resources and users), let me know.  (For example, after restoring test with a back-up from prod., I don't want to mess up actual production accounts by performing tests in the test env.)

[SGTech]

Hi David Hettlinger

After restore your prod. RSA backup in test environment you lost all test environment settings and Database if you don't want to disturb your test environment, deploy new RSA AM instance in VMware / ESXi and restore backup from Production to new instance.

other hand if your production environment is HA setup ensure all the replica are properly replicating and apply 8.3 to primary first then replica. if no HA setup there will be down time for authentication.

Thanks

Rajesh Gogineni [M.Tech Production Pte ltd]