[ActiveDir] how to replicate a production envrionment.. ?

[Rob Ryan]

I’m faced with a bit of a challenge that hopefully someone can provide some better ideas than I’ve come up with.. my company is bringing in a fairly complex identity management product that is largely AD-unaware and I need to make sure it gets adequately tested before it makes it into our production environment – given the complexity of our tree, various schema additions, etc, I really need to be able to replicate everything in the directory over to the lab so we can determine what will break which this new software gets deployed.   My initial ideas were to either a) do restores of the various domains in our lab onto new boxes, or b) just copy the VM’s from a dc in each domain into the lab – either option would require significant metadata cleanup in the “new” forest to eliminate the hundred or so sites and other DC’s we’ve got around our environment..   am I stuck down this route to get the data I need or is there an easier way that is just escaping my narrow view?   -- r