Ideas for home lab

Greetings all, first post here. I apologize in advance if this question has been asked a million times, I did some poking around on the forum before I decided to post.

First, a brief background of myself: I have worked in IT Support for almost 8 years. Just finished up Cisco CCNA and working on CCNA Security. I've decided that before I continue on to CCNP that I should get at least the MCSA to add to my resume. I have some very minor experience with Microsoft Server, mostly file shares and permissions and creating AD accounts.

I'd like some guidance on what hardware I would need for a home lab for the MCSA exams. Would a separate machine be required for the install/configure/practice of Server 2012 or can it be done in a VM? My primary computer is a very powerful machine and I already run several VMs with VMWare on that machine. Would I gain the needed experience by installing Server 2012 in a VM? I'm also concerned about nested VMs, meaning, if I were to install Server 2012 as a VM with VMWare would I be able to create HYPER-V VMs inside the Server VM? (My machine can handle the resources hit for multiple VMs, but not sure if it's feasible to run nested VMs.)

I'm not against building a dedicated box for Server 2012, but if I can save the money I'm all for it.

Thanks in advance!

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lmoworld

Installing Hyper-V on VMWare Workstation

You can do it. My current set up is several 2 Servers, 3 Virtual machines, and ESXi server. Hopefully this answers your question. VMware workstation gives you a 60 day trial period if you don't want to buy.

lmoworld

Forgot to mention that you can make an internal network with your lab to get everything talking. Good Luck

Louie1277

Load yourself the hyper-v core since it's free and create your vm's from there. You will need win8 for the manager to connect to the hyper-v and create the vms ... if you don't have win8 create a vm from virutalbox and run it from there.

That's how I have it setup at home.