Setting up a ClearQuest sandbox environment
- Published:
- categories: ibm
- tags: automation, clearquest, db2, ibm
There are lots of reasons for needing a testing environment, but unfortunately not a lot of good guidance on how to do it. In a past life I was a CQ support monkey, so I know my way around ClearQuest and some of the challenges of working with it as an administrator. Hopefully this will help make someone’s life a bit easier, I know that it helps me and I use it quite often.
Let’s take a full pass through the scenario to understand what is going on. Since parallel development and testing is challenging in a ClearQuest environment it is pretty standard fare to have a Production as well as some type of development or staging environment. In this case, I have a Windows 2003 R2 32 bit production CQ Web server environment running 7.1.1.1 with DB2 9.5.4 also running on Windows for the time being. So in order for me to do my due diligence in testing, I want to try and match the environment as closely as I can. Since CQ is a database driven application the database server is the next most important piece, there is currently no CQ interchange format so we need to rely on the DB2 backups. This leaves with a situation where we need to match the host platform for the db server as well {{1}}. Long story short, I setup a Windows 2003 R2 32bit VM Ware image on my VMWare server machine, installed and licensed CQ 7.1.1.1 web and client, and DB2 9.5.4. For the validation testing I am doing the hardware disparity is not an issue, for a staging environment or some kind of performance testing obviously this is not going to cut it.
Now since I am relying on DB2 for my backups, I am taking the easy route and using the same Database names and the same user. So I just need to create the same OS level user on my test environment that I am using in production, create the empty DB2 databases and we are ready to receive some backups from production.