70-409 Lab Setup

AvgITGeek

Hello all.
Prior to this exam, all of my labs have been in Hyper-V running on my Windows 10 workstation. I've gotten to the point where that limits my ability to lab certain topics. I'd like to use VMware in some form but I've never used it on a home machine before. I've always installed ESXi on a server and away I went. I can't do that in my case now. How have you set up your labs for this exam?

Cisco Inferno

I tried it and really needed a bare minimum of around 24GB of ram. No need to do it.

You should use Microsoft Virtual Labs for this one.
System Center 2012 R2: Lab 1 – Infrastructure Provisioning & Management with Virtual Machine Manager
System Center 2012 R2: Lab 2 – Infrastructure Provisioning & Management with Virtual Machine Manager

There are even more detailed labs from Microsoft Technet. All of these labs are really great resources because of the included lab guide that you work through. Just search for the word "hyper".
Technet Virtual Labs


Have you watched the Official Videos from Microsoft?
Microsoft Virtual Academy

Have you watched the CBT Nuggets 40-414 Series? and some of the CBT Nuggets 70-412 series?
The 414 one is really helpful.

AvgITGeek

I did OK with 6 VMs running in Hyper-V when I did the 70-411 I imagine I wouldn't need more than that concurrently running. I'll check out the virtual labs for sure and the MS videos. I do not have a CBT Nuggets subscription but I do have Pluralsight.

Cisco Inferno

Yeah those labs are 4 hours long each. The labs also help where its impossible to set up complex hosting scenarios including different types of storage, cluster share volumes and other things I dont have the ram for.