Creating a Test Environment
Asked by markxsimu:

Is there any instructions or guide on how to do this? I am following this guide: <https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/create-a-staging-environment-for-upgrading-confluence-866094180.html>

But I have no clue on how to replicate my environment. JIRA and Confluence are on a different server right now. Would I need another server?


Answers:
author: Danyal Iqbal
body: Skip the tutorial in the link if you have no clue.

Are these virtual machine? -1 for bad practices if they are not VM's:)

Clone the VM's, change the base url and run the upgrade.

You are in for some serious pain if these servers are not virtual machines.

comments: author: Sloan
body: I absolutely agree. VMs are the way to go!

Additions:

* If you use VMs and use an external Database Server you need to clone the database there manually of course.
* You may want to change Mail Server settings on a test clone in Jira and Confluence.


author: markxsimu
body: Okay, so I am not sure if they are installed on a VM, I am not the one who installed them. But why is it important that they are on VMs?


author: Sloan
body: Hi [@markxsimu](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1414864)

I recommend setting up a test environment on servers. It is no have to, but I highly recommend it.

If you want to, you can run your staging or test Jira/Confluence on the same server but please consider these points:

* Change the port number of your test-Jira / Confluence in tomcats server.xml.
* Change the port number of synchrony of the test Confluence if working with Confluence 6, learn [here](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeap/administering-collaborative-editing-847355676.html) how to do it.
* The server must be strong enough. Take perfomance in consideration.
* Keep in mind not to accidentally connect two Jira/Confluence to the same database.

Cheers  
Niklas

comments: author: acast2
body: Hi [@Sloan N_ B_](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/316409) based on your input and that of [@Danyal Iqbal](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/430572) there seems to be two approaches to this replication of the test environment. I'm using virtual machines for this as the majority of our servers are VM's.

Up until now I've been using the Atlassian documentation on creating my test environment and based on my situation, I'm wondering if using the clone method mentioned by [@Danyal Iqbal](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/430572) is the way to go for me?

Here is my situation:

I'm taking over this project to upgrade our Jira production environment but first need to do this in test to make sure all works well. The existing test server was running a newer version of Jira compared to our production server plus we're so far behind that we're EOL on the versions that we're running on both anyway.

Our production is on 7.6 and our test was on 7.8. Since I'm taking over this now that the previous individual is no longer here, I wanted to start clean so I built a new VM for test and installed a clean installation of 7.6. Now, I'm trying to take the backup of our production SQL database and restore it on the new test VM but the documentation isn't clear on whether I should override the existing DB from the clean install or create a new DB with the restored DB?

I tried the override option first and later things didn't go well, which made me think that the documentation saying your test DB needs to be different than your production DB that I'm restoring was the reason, so now I'm starting over.

This is when I decided to check the community here and found this post. Would creating an image/clone of my production VM be better and just rename the server, change the base URL to be my test environment, follow the other steps of the documentation on disabling things like email, etc. to make sure nothing points back to production and then run the upgrade there?