To imitate the production environment, you need to run in a virtual lab the whole set of interdependent applications.
#Sharepoint upgrade from 2013 to 2016 upgrade
Note that all changes performed while testing an upgrade will occur only in Veeam’s Virtual Lab, while your production SharePoint 2010 server will be safe and fully available to end users. In just several minutes, you can create a clone of your SharePoint 2013 environment and safely run any tests against your new deployment. Virtual Lab is isolated and you can be 100% sure your production is safe and unaffected while testing. There is no need to add any extra resources - you can use an existing Hyper-V host according to which of these two virtualization platforms you use for SharePoint. You will get an exact copy of your main site, even with the same network configuration. This requirement is easy to achieve, if you use a Virtual Lab (On-Demand Sandbox) provided in Veeam Backup & Replication. Microsoft recommends keeping your test environment as similar to your production as possible.
Create a test SharePoint environment using Veeam’s Virtual Lab Combining Virtual Lab and backup capabilities, you can perform a test upgrade of your SharePoint server in a sandbox and be more certain things will go well during the actual upgrade. With Veeam, you can leverage for testing purposes your SharePoint backups, which you may already use as a part of your data protection strategy.
Best practices for testing a SharePoint upgrade It’ll be handy for small and midsized companies lacking extra infrastructure resources for testing purposes. Note: The testing approach I’m going to discuss works for simple SharePoint deployments without any programmed customizations. Veeam isn’t just backup and restore! Take a look at how it can fit and assist while you’re preparing to upgrade virtualized SharePoint 2010 to 2013. While we’re preparing for the upcoming Veeam Availability Suite v9 release and promoting new features, there’s still a lot you can do with version 8.