Cloning a MS BPC 10 PRD to a DEV environment

[Former Member]

Hi experts,

We want to build a DEV environment by cloning an existing MS BPC 10 PRD environment.

Do you know of a client or an implementation that has successfully done this?

Normally, we would do a base install of all the components of the system, i.e. SQL, Visual Studio and BPC. However, the client wants to do a physical backup (image) of the existing BPC server and restore to a new BPC server instance. From what I understand, BPC connects to the SQL tables and OLAP using the hostname, and if the connection is renamed, it breaks the connection and BPC. Is there a way around this?

Any information will be highly appreciated.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Joey,

we have done that with success following the following steps:

1-Install BPC normally in the DEV Server (Configure server, Install Sql Server, Install BPC)

2-Open BPC Server Manager and Backup PRD Environment

3-Copy PRD Bkp folder to DEV Server

4-Open BPC Server Manager in DEV Server, go to environment, Restore environment and select the folder of PRD Bkp.

5-Follow the steps (verify SQL and OLAP Instances are configured correctly, etc)

After that, you will have a copy of the environment, also with the same name running in Dev server.

You may have troubles with your reports if they don't have the "Do not store connection" option selected, because when migrated they are still pointing to PRD Server.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Santiago R.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your reply Santiago.

fyi, the clients are thinking of skipping step #1. They are planning to restore (not a base install of BPC and components)  from physical backup (image) of an existing server with BPC already installed.

There's a small problem with this approach, as it will copy all the BPC settings in the following AppServer tables, i.e. tblAppSetInfo, tblAppSetServerInfo, tblServerDefaults and tblServerInfo. There may be other tables, but these 4 are quite obvious as these set the BPC connection strings to the server and the SQL tables.

There's a possibility that the cloned environment will break when the connection strings are changed and will attempt to connect to the copied environment (as set in the 4 tables mentioned above).

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Joey,

thanks for your reply. I think i misunderstood you.

In my experience the client had the dev server in a VM Ware machine and cloned it to a qa environment and gave it to us.

We tried to configure the cloned server from server manager, registry, services, etc and we never got it to function properly.

We had to do it twice and lost a lot of time.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Santiago

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Santiago,

I did it to my VM as well, just to prove that it may work, but it didn't.

Thanks for your help and confirmation.