SOLABS QM10 Instance Flash - What is there to Know?

Why clients need to Flash their Production environment?

This process is common and enables clients to test/validate/qualify how their Production environment reacts to a set of changes, such as system updates, without impacting the Production environment. 

This can also be requested by SOLABS related to a specific project such as a Core Software update or QM App deployment. It could also be performed related to a support request to help investigate or fix an issue.

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

What does it mean to Flash an environment?

Essentially we restore your Production environment over to another environment, usually the Validation environment. SOLABS can also, in certain cases, flash your Production environment into a Sandbox environment.

When restoring the Production environment over the Validation one, the following key points are important to know:

• The entire Validation system will be erased and therefore the following will happen:
  • The data in the Validation environment will be overwritten with the data from the Production environment.
  • The system in itself, core files, will be overwritten. If for example your Validation instance had version 10.8.1 but your Production environment is at version 10.7.0, your Validation will be at version 10.7.0 at the end of the restoration process.
  • System Configurations that differs from Production are overridden.
  • At the end of the intervention the instance is rebranded as a Validation instance.
  • The Validation instance ID is kept. This ID uniquely identifies a SOLABS QM instance. 
    
    
• The Production environment is unaffected:
  • When doing this type of work, backups of the Production environment are used.  Therefore, there is no impact on the Production environment itself.

What are the default options used by SOLABS to flash an environment?

When performing an environment flash we use the following defaults unless otherwise specified:

• To which environment should the Production environment be flashed?: VALIDATION

• User email addresses are erased?: YES

  • This is to prevent users from receiving email notifications from the Validation environment.
  • Note that you can set email addresses after the flash.

• User Login types are set to Database?: YES

  • Should user passwords be all set to the same value?: YES

• Restore Database & Core files or only Database?: 

  • This option is configured by SOLABS depending on the context of the flash requests

• Set environment to HOSTED_READONLY?: YES

  • Validation instances are always set to HOSTED_READONLY as SYSTEM TYPE configuration.