Home Lab on laptop.

aBlackPerson

Is there a write up somewhere on building a home lab for a laptop? Something i can visualize on top of windows 7. Thanks

Magmadragoon

Have you done any virtualization?

ssnyderu2

You can download virtual box (free) and run server operating systems in a virtual environment. I would recommend at least a quad core CPU and 8GB of RAM on the laptop, more is better.

aBlackPerson

I'm running an Alienware 17 Laptop, with i7 and 16gb ram.
I haven't done much virtualization. I have already setup 3 different instances of Server 2012 using virtual box. Was just looking for some sort of walk through to get it all setup as a LAN of some sort so i can experiment with remote management, file shares, local storage etc.

bohack

I know I posted this in another thread... However if you want the ultimate lab machine, first replace your magnetic drive with an SSD or add the SSD as a secondary drive just for VMware. Then follow this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG3vXlo2q7M you will need VMware Workstation 10 or higher to be able to nest Hyper-V inside of VMware. I use this setup to teach Hyper-V and it works really well... Check out the other labs on the channel, I have a full tutorial on building a Windows Failover Cluster inside of VMware. Virtual Box is good, but lacks the features they pack into VMware... Good Luck!

aBlackPerson

Thanks a lot Bohack.

bohack

No problem... Let me know how you like it... Between my free time (possibly this weekend) I'll post the resource files I used to build the lab on the main website networkedminds.com. I urge you to get a second SSD, you will sing the praises of Bohack forever 840 or 850 EVOs are cheap don't waste your money on an EVO Pro. I have both the EVO and EVO Pro and I don't see that big of a difference. The IOPs are amazing though!

aBlackPerson

I would if i could man, but just had a new born and can't spare too much else right now.

bohack

Congratulations! Keep your eye on slickdeals around the holidays... Your laptop will have no problem running the labs. You'll just have to wait for things to load. Work on one VM at a time and let it finish.

Snow.bros

aBlackPerson wrote: »

Was just looking for some sort of walk through to get it all setup as a LAN of some sort so i can experiment with remote management, file shares, local storage etc.

You can set all your VMs according to the screenshot below. This is how have set up mine, all my vm's can communicate with each other including the host or you can set them to use 'Bridged Adapter'.