Lab Setup for 70-270

Not sure if this question has been run into the ground or not, but I am trying to set up a lab to study for the 70-270 exam.

I was thinking of doing the following setup:
I have VMWare Workstation 5.5 with Windows Server 2003 and XP as the client in Host-Only mode. I am not sure if anyone has done this or if this is ideal.

I also have 2 pc's but they are old 333 and 400 MHz pc's with barely enough RAM for my sanity to run the above config physically.

I bought the MS Press 70-270 book and waiting on it to come in and not sure if i can run those exercises on this config.

How did you all run your setups and practices? Thanks for any advice

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Comments

eurotrash

i don't know how vmware works, but for my 270 "lab" i just used one pc with xp installed, nothing else.
was able to do most everything like that, except for the RIS and maybe a few other things, but i'm good at imagining them, lol.

Breadfan

what did you do for RIS?

That and Sysprep I believe I will need a server for that to practice on.

The MS Press book should be here tomorrow

and then the fun shall begin

TechJunky

For RIS you will need more than just one server. You will need a AD server, then a Member Server. The member server will need more than one hard drive partition. RIS image files cannot be installed on the same partition as the boot partition. So when you go to implement your RIS make sure you have these requirements. VNC doesnt really work for the RIS implementation. However, you could use VNC for your AD server.

I hope this helps some and good luck!

kalebksp

TechJunky wrote:

For RIS you will need more than just one server. You will need a AD server, then a Member Server. The member server will need more than one hard drive partition. RIS image files cannot be installed on the same partition as the boot partition. So when you go to implement your RIS make sure you have these requirements. VNC doesnt really work for the RIS implementation. However, you could use VNC for your AD server.

What are you talking about? You only need one server for RIS.

TechJunky

Please expand. Simply saying it does not work doesnt do anyone any good.

My point is you will not have a RIS server without an AD environment.
Might as well learn how to set it up correctly. RIS without AD is poorly implemented IMO. Why not take the full advantage of RIS with AD? Btw, you will need a dhcp server as well configured with scopes.

If you think I am blowing smoke then visit microsoft themselves.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/deploy/depopt/remoteos.mspx

Please dont post something like this if you are trying to enhance your ego on the internet. This site is for helpful information, so instead of providing a comment that doesnt need to be there, please provide useful information.

Thanks.

kalebksp

Didn't intend to hurt your feelings.

You said that you need a member server to have RIS deployment, which is incorrect. You can have AD, DHCP, and RIS all on the same server. That did need to be said because it's not very nice to give people false information, whether intentionally or ignorantly.

BF2Mad

kalebksp wrote:

What are you talking about? You only need one server for RIS.

I think what kalebksp meant is you can install AD and RIS on the same sever, which will be fine in a lab environment.

One server with AD, DNS and RIS (needs two partitions) if you use a router for your broadband that will take care of DHCP.

If you want to play will RIS and Sysprep then you will need a reference machine (or vmware machine) to create your image from, and a machine to image to. Both the reference and the machine that is going to get the image must have the same HAL and disk controller so two vmware's would be good.

Remember that with sysprep you need a third party imaging tool such as ghost, with RIS you can use Riprep.exe if you are going to be creating an image or you can just do a attended or unattended CD based install using RIS

This may be over the top for 70-270 but that would make a good set-up

kalebksp

That's what I did when I was studying for 70-270. You can also use the reference machine as the deployment machine if you just want to practice with sysprep/riprep.

Go Bucks

If you would like to try some free imaging software you might want to take a look at DriveImage XML:

http://www.runtime.org/index.html

I think somewhere on this board somebody mentioned it the other day. I was playing with it some today and it seems to be pretty good for home use anyway....especially for the price

Breadfan

I am trying to decide if I can do the Chapter 1 exercises (like attended and unattended installs, network, cdrom) installs using vmware with a virtual 2003 server and virtual xp client; or would it better to just do it physically from 2 pc's i have setup at home (only prob there is they are 400 mhz with 256 ram

)

Again, thanks for the help and advice

BF2Mad

Your choice the pc's meet the requirments

I would do it all in vmware because I like to have all of the pc's on one screen but that is just me.

jescab

I vote for vmware...........