Convert production environment to development environment

Question

I'm in the process of trying to setup a development server for our SharePoint based Intranet. Our current production setup is comprised of two servers: one front-end web server and the SQL instance on our SQL cluster for the database.

My ideal solution, would be to house the database and web front-end on the same development server. I was hoping to make a clone of our current web server, and then restore backup copies of the databases from the cluster instance onto a local instance of SQL.

I was wondering if anyone has attempted, hopefully with success, a similar scenario previously, and could provide some insight on how to get SharePoint talking to a database locally rather than trying to reach out to our cluster. I'm hoping to do this without having to build a whole new SharePoint server -- I want to keep everything as close to the current production setup as possible.

We've already had the production web server cloned, and I've installed a copy of SQL and restored all of the databases. My next step is to get SharePoint to talk to the databases on the local server. That is where I need help. I was thinking of using a SQL Native Client alias for the production server name, and route it to localhost. However, I wasn't sure where all SharePoint was configured to look for a specific database server.

Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, maybe I'm going about this entirely the wrong way. Maybe I should build out a new SharePoint server and just restore content databases?

Answer 1

You're far easier just building the single server farm and restoring the content databases.

Read this thread for a very similar question: Is it possible to migrate and attach a wss 3.0 configuration database to a new Foundation 2010 front-end?