Home > Storage > PowerVault > Guides > Dell PowerVault ME5 Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices > Create a test environment with ME5 snapshots
In addition to VM recovery, ME5 snapshots can be used to quickly create test or development environments that mirror a production environment. When volumes containing VMs are replicated to another location, it is easy to do so at a different location.
Note: To avoid IP, MAC address, or server name conflicts, copies of existing VMs that are brought online should be isolated.
The procedure to use a snapshot to create a test environment from an existing Hyper-V guest VM is similar to VM recovery. The main difference is that the original VM continues operation, and the VM copy is configured so that it is isolated from the original VM.