Running multiple instances of Microsoft Master Data Services on the same server

Question

I have an instance of MS SQL Server 2012 with MDS. The MDS instance is used as a production environment.

Now, of course, I would like to have a dev/test environment for MDS. Currently I just have one server with one instance running SQL Server 2012 and if possible it would be enough to set up a new instance of MDS on this SQL Server Instance. Do you have any experience of doing that?

Or is it better to install a test MDS environment on another server?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It is very important that you do a deployclone, and not deploynew. If you do a deploynew, you will not be able to push model changes from dev to test/prod later on.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh479646.aspx

Answer 2

I backup -> restored the MDS database and used the MDS Configuration Manager to set up the rest. Worked perfect.

Answer 3

Yes, you can have any number of MDS instances running off of a single SQL server installation. The only requirement is that each MDS instance have its own database. You can either:

1. Create a new database using the MDS configuration tool and then use the model deployment tool to bring across your models. More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff486956.aspx.

2. Follow user1407800's advice above and just backup and restore the production database. If you do use the backup/restore approach however, make sure you select the database at least once in the configuration tool so that it can verify everything's okay with the restored DB and repair any issues.

Once you have the database in place you can create a new web application that runs on top of it using the MDS Configuration Manager.