[help] requirements for 70-680 labbing

doublehunter

Forgive my stupidity but may I ask what are the tools I need to start labbing on 70-680? Of course I need to have a computer that can run windows 7 and virtual machine. I only have AMD A6 5400k and 4GB RAM and Oracle Virtual box. Do I need to have Win7 SP1 32bit/64 bit ultimate or enterprise? As what I've read they have the same exact feature but the enterprise is for volume licensing. Since I will simulate deployment on 70-680 do I need to get a WIN7 Enterprise version or Ultimate will be good enough? Also for the Win server 2008 r2 should I get the Win Server 2008 r2 32bit?64bit? or Win Server 2008 r2 with hyper-v?32bit?64bit? Sorry for the idiotic question I just dont want to waste my bandwidth downloading the wrong flavor of the OS I need.

For my VMs can I set them to use only 256 or 512 ram so my host machine can accommodate 2client VM and 1server VM?

Thanks in advance!

dcgj

I have run Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Ent on 512 MB of RAM on previous occasions and can tell you that the systems will run VERY slow. It's doable though. I would advise a RAM upgrade so you have 8 GB in total.

I'm not able to say anything regarding your CPU since my knowledge on that field is to small.

Regarding the versions: Enterprise and Ultimate are the same when it comes to features. Only the licensing is different. You can download trial versions of both client and server from technet for free. I used the Server 2008 R2 x64 and chose Standard when prompted during the install.

doublehunter

Thanks for your input. I am trying to do labbing now but i guess my problem now is my limited hard drive space I can only setup 4vhd with 20gb each, and needs to study more about the windows server. Never had experience setting up AD, DCHP, WDS and MDT server, WSUS server and branchcache. Will work on that more and follow your study notes.

dcgj

I ran into the hard drive space issue as well. Don't be shy to ask people you know, if they have got an old disk lying around. I personally got one from a good friend.