SharePoint Clone VM

Question

What all changes would be required to clone a SharePoint VM? Following is the scenario:

There is a production environment VM containing one WFE server and one database server. We want to clone this prod environment to create a QA environment. Both server resides in same network.

After cloning, what all steps needs to be performed so that QA environment does not point to the Production environment?

SharePoint version is 2010.

Answer 1

I would not recommend to do so. Better create a new Farm and backup your old ContentDatabase, and restore the later on the new SQL Server and reattach to the new WebApplication.

Just Cloning you will have way too much issues when changing the Servers-Name

Answer 2

Assume (for simplicity) you have 2 VMs WFE and SQL. You need to:

1. Make a copy of your VM (in Hyper-V I usually copy vhds and create new VM based on those). Let's call them WFE2 and SQL2.
2. Turn off WFE and SQL. Turn on WFE2 and SQL2.
3. Rename SQL2 machine and create new alias for it
4. Rename WFE2 machine. I recommend this article with the exception of use stsadm instead of Rename-SPServer