At work there are several of us that have wanted to be able to setup a lab environment for testing powershell scripts, configuration changes, training, and other things. The way we’ve done it in the past is to run one or two VM’s on our desktops. The problem with that is you usually can’t have enough VM’s running for a good lab. We got the ok to purchase 4 servers from eBay that we could load up and have enough resources to run 15 to 20 VM’s without much problem. I should note that the VM’s may run a little slow, but that can be expected for a lab setup.
The servers we got on eBay were Cisco UCS C220 M3 LFF’s. They came with 2 Intel E5-2660 processors (8-cores at 2.2GHz), four 1TB hard drive, and 64GB of RAM. We had some 16GB DIMMs laying around from some other memory upgrades we’ve done. We were able to add that to the server and get the RAM up to 256GB.
I loaded Windows Server 2016 Standard on the server I’m using and then using VMWare Workstation as the hypervisor.
With this setup I will be able to setup a pretty simple network.
Here is a list of topics I will cover as I buildout my lab setup.
- Basic Windows Server 2016 Standard Install
- Configuring DNS, DHCP, and Active Directory for a New Forest and Domain
- Adding a Second Domain Controller to an Existing Domain
- Windows Server Update Service
- Setting Up a File Server and using Distributed File System (DFS)
- Exchange Server 2016 with a DAG
Other items I will add to this lab.
- McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO)
- F5 Load Balancer
As with most installations, there is probably more than one way to do these setups. The instructions that will follow will just be the way these.
I’ll come back here and link to the other posts as I get them uploaded.
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