FLASH SOLABS QM10, commonly referred to as "PROD to VAL".

Why would clients want to Flash their Production environment?

This process is an integral component as part of SOLABS' service architecture. It enables clients to test and qualify changes ahead of moving them to their Production environments. 

Clients can also request an environment flash for their own reasons, mostly to have their Validation environment updated and aligned with the Production environment, especially for training purposes.

What happens?

Essentially, your Production environment is restored over another environment, generally the Validation environment. SOLABS can also, in certain cases, flash your Production environment into a Sandbox environment, where you would want to test-drive QM APPs for instance.

When restoring the Production environment over Validation, the following points are key to note:

• • The process is automated. 
  • The data in the Validation environment is overwritten with the data from the Production environment.
  • The system (program files) are overwritten. If for example your Validation instance is at release 10.9.1, but the Production environment is at release 10.8.0, your Validation environment will be at 10.8.0 after the flash is complete.
  • System Configurations that differ from Production are overwritten.
  • The Validation instance is branded as Validation instance with a watermark on the side of the screen.
  • The Validation instance ID is kept. This ID uniquely identifies a SOLABS QM10 instance. 
  • There is no impact on the Production environment unless a current copy is required. Then a Production downtime is required to make this copy. 

Available Flash Options: 

• User email addresses are erased? Default is set to "YES". Emails can be added back manually for specific users. This is to prevent users from receiving email notifications from the Validation environment. 

• Collaborative Review can be enabled and pointing to a Validation library, assuming it is enabled in the Production environment.
• All QM10 documents (all files) are replaced with a dummy file (file Obfuscation)? : Default is set to "YES". This is the default behavior for security & confidentiality reasons.

Other Flash Behaviors (Mandatory):

• User Login types are all set to Database. SSO configurations are not supported in the Validation environments.  

• Passwords are all set to the same value. A password is automatically generated and provided to clients. Passwords can be changed manually after.