One of the challenges of being a good technical sales resource for Microsoft is staying fresh with the technology. Many times we get some great resources (Hands On Labs, Demo VM's, and On Demand Live Meeting technical sessions) within Microsoft corporate by providing us in the sales field some pre-baked labs. But it doesn't always give you that "Getting your hands dirty" feeling. So I decided to bite the bullet and build my own lab. And not just a lab that focuses on a single group of technologies, but I wanted to have a lab that deployed a large number of technologies.

If you've ever read some of my previous blog posts before, I try to give you a feeling of what I went through, including major issues and how to resolve them. I hope to make this a Blog Series and give you updates as I deploy new technologies, go through some updates, and develop new tools as needed.

Hardware

First off, I should point out the hardware that I'm using to do this. I've been fortunate to get a pretty strong workstation from work to do this. Here are the specs

• Model: Dell Precision 690
• CPU: Intel Xeon Quad-Core
• RAM: 8 GB
• Disks
  • 0: OS, 200GB (Split Partition: Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
  • 1: Data, 640GB
  • 2: Western Digital My Book, 500GB
• OS: Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta (x64)

Platform

In order to build pseudo-realistic lab, I need to host a number servers to give a good distribution of servers. In order to do this, I needed to go Virtual to make it work. When I first started to build the lab, I built it using Microsoft Virtual Server R2 with Service Pack 1 applied. The lab ran pretty well, but I wanted to run on the latest virtualization technology by Microsoft. So I then rebuilt my machine with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V (Beta). At this point, Windows Server 2008 is in Release Candidate mode (So we'll be ready to ship that soon) and Hyper-V is in Beta mode (This actually came out early as it was due to ship with Windows Server 2008 RTM).

When I did the deployment of Windows Server 2008, I wanted to try out the Server Core installation to see how the performance would be, but at the time I didn't have the documentation to do this from the command line since there isn't a GUI in Server Core mode. So I went with the "Full Installation" as part of the setup.

Virtual Machines

Here are the virtual machines that I created and their specs.    

As you can see, there are quite a bit of virtual machines and technologies. So due to the lack of RAM, I can only start a few at a time. This has an impact of what I can show at any given time, but still allows me to have quite a bit going when I need it.

Deployment

I started the deployment by first doing a typical Windows Server 2003 R2 installation in a Virtual Machine. Once that was done, I installed all of the latest service packs, hotfixes, and whatever else Windows Update told me to deploy. With that completed, I always like to install the Support Tools found on the product CD. This gives me some handy tools whenever I need it. Not a good idea to do in a production system as a standard installation, but it suites me just fine in my lab.

The next step was to prepare the server for imaging. Well, I'm not really going to image them. What I did was used the SysPrep tool to wipe the server of all its unique information. Once this was done, I stopped the virtual machine and saved a copy of that VHD file (This is the virtual hard drive for the virtual machine) and made a number of copies of them. I know I could use Windows Deployment Service which is a core component of System Center Configuration Manager 2007, Windows Server 2008, and a solution accelerator (Microsoft Deployment), but that's a later blog post.

Active Directory

All of the servers are in a single forest/domain in Active Directory. I also created a specific OU for Service Accounts which were required by many of the server product installations (more on that in another post). By putting them all in a single OU, it makes it easier for me to keep track of them as I go along.

I also stored all of the user accounts I would create as standard corporate users in a different OU as well. This should keep my overall AD design a bit cleaner (I hope).

Networking

Each virtual machine has two network interfaces. One of them is assigned to an "Internal Only" private virtual network. This keeps all of the lab communication within that network. I then hook up a separate network interface(all DHCP) to a public network so that I can directly download other components. I'll shut that off once I setup an ISA server for the front end network. That's a task for a later date.

Next Steps

Now that everything is ready to go, I now need to install some backend components. I'll start off with some System Center products (Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and Data Protection Manager 2007), SQL Server 2005, SoftGrid, and more. I'll describe this as a move along and post the results soon.

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