Hello everyone! I'm reaching out to the community to ask what I think is a very relevant question.
If you are at all like me, and I hope that many of you are, you probably are always interested in the Release Candidates and Beta programs that Solarwinds offers. With that in mind, I've always tried to keep a development/test server in my environment. Our development environment is and always has been on virtualized hardware. I like to put the software (new updates, RC's or Beta's) on the development server and find out how it interacts with our environment before I push the install to the production environment. This is especially useful when it comes to new features that have been added - especially to Server & Application Monitor and Network Configuration Monitor.
I like the idea of taking a snapshot just before I install the Solarwinds Software and rolling back if I need to install new software (especially CTP or Beta versions). Our organization isn't very happy with the idea of using a snapshot of a virtual machine because we use a highly available infrastructure and the additional storage needed always raises some arguments.
That being said, does anyone have what they feel is a best practice?