I would like to duplicate some of the machines in our production environment into a virtual environment for testing purposes. Most of our production machines are on the 192.168.2.0 network, including our VMware Server host. I would like to clone some of our machines, such as our Exchange server (192.168.2.10) and possibly a domain controller (192.168.2.15).
I know I could create a private virtual network on, say, VMnet2 with a 192.168.2.0 subnet (same as production) and configure the test servers to use this network. However, I would still like the test servers, specifically the Exchange server, to have access to the Internet in order to test e-mail functionality. Is this possible given the fact that VMware Server host's physical NIC is part of the production 192.168.2.0 network? I obviously want to avoid any IP/DNS conflicts with the production environment.
To sum it up, I'm looking for suggestions on ways to create a virtual test environment using cloned VMs of my production servers that would allow those servers to still have Internet access. Is this possible if I want the VMs to retain the same IP and DNS names as their production counterparts? If not, how does everyone go about duplicating their production environment for testing purposes?
Thanks for your help.