Setting up a Blackbaud Netcommunity / Raiser's Edge test environment

In steps, how we went about setting up a test environment for Blackbaud Netcommunity & Raiser's Edge, that duplicated (as close as possible) our live setup.

• Get the hardware to run it on

Our live setup is three servers - a Netcommunity application server (holding the application & web services), a Netcommunity database server, and a Raiser's Edge server. We're still running Netcommunity 5.6, so all three of those servers are running Windows Server 2003.
For the test environment, we decided to go down the route of using Virtual Machines - 3 VMs that are running Windows Server 2003, running on the host server which is a powerful Windows Server 2008 R2 server. The VM software we are using (Hyper-V, which is built into Server 2008) is great, you can easily take snapshots of the state of the servers and restore to them later, and make all sorts of changes.

• Install the operating systems onto the hardware

As above, we are currently still on BBNC 5.6, so we're using Windows Server 2003. We're going to use this test environment to upgrade to the latest version soon, and see how it goes - that's the great thing about virtualisation. If it doesn't work out, we just restore the old VMs.

• Install Raiser's Edge onto RE server

Once all the server OSs have been patched up fully, install Raiser's Edge onto the RE VM. This was relatively painless, but took a little while. We did have problems with the installation detecting our existing Raiser's Edge installation (the live one) and confusing itself (the VMs are on the same network as our live setup) - we then had to uninstall it and run the process again. Blackbaud support were helpful with that.

• Install Raiser's Edge client onto Netcommunity application server

This needs to be present in order for the web services to work properly - pretty straightforward to install, we didn't really have any problems.

• Install Netcommunity database onto Netcommunity database server

This was also pretty straightforward - installing the BBNC DB is simply a case of running the BBNC installation file and choosing 'custom' to just install the database.
We did have to do some messing around with the database later on, once the Netcommunity application was installed properly - the recovery mode of the database needs to be set to 'simple' and a backup needs to be performed. Other minor configuration tweaks might be needed, but the best thing to do is either check Blackbaud's knowledge base or give them a ring.

• Install the rest of Netcommunity onto the application server

Next, we installed the rest of Netcommunity onto the application server - the application itself, the web services, etc. Once that was done, I tried to open the Netcommunity admin page. It failed straight away. Eek.
In order to get it to work, we needed to grant permissions to various files & folders to an account named NETWORK SERVICE. We also had to change the recovery model of the database (as above), and we had a few problems with the Netcommunity installation package not working properly - uninstalling Netcommunity, removing all the temporary files it leaves behind, and trying again seemed to sort that one out.
Once the admin page came up successfully, I loaded the testconfig.aspx page (your-url.net/netcommunity/testconfig.aspx) to see if anything else was awry. During the application installation process it asks you for Blackbaud Services login details - we didn't need to use this, so we just put gibberish in instead. I understand that installing a more recent version of Netcommunity requires you to enter Blackbaud Payment Service info - I guess you may have to put the live info into there for it to work. We also had a few problems with the web.config file that needed to be adjusted, but again, the knowledge base was very helpful with sorting it out.

• Restore the live databases to the servers

The next, and optional step is to backup the live databases for both Raiser's Edge and Netcommunity, and restore them to the databases in the test environment. That way you will have a relatively recent version of your live setup, duplicated onto your test servers.
Bear in mind that things like customisations are not stored in the database and will therefore need to be copied across manually.
Our next step is to trial out the latest version of Netcommunity, and see how we get on - we have a lot of custom parts that could potentially get broken. Hopefully not.