290 home lab requirements

mclemore1mclemore1 Member Posts: 37 ■■□□□□□□□□
in Server 70-290
I have no experience with servers but ready to learn. I just ordered the ms press book with the 180 day 2003 enterprise evaluation edition. Can someone tell me what the recomended system requirments are? Will it run on a regular pent 4 desktop? I have three computers on my home network now and I would like to purchase another machine just for the 2003 edition?
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  • SieSie Member Posts: 1,195
    There you go.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/sysreqs/default.mspx

    I run VMWare and have a Virtual 2003 Server and 2 XP Clients running.

    You can also use VirtualPC 2004 as its free and does the job just aswell.
    Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools
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  • Danman32Danman32 Member Posts: 1,243
    Not only will 2003 run on P4, it will run on PIII 750.
    My lab consisted of 2 desktops and one laptop.
    One of my desktops is a P4 2.8G dual booted to XP and W2K3 with many partitions on the HD. The other desktop is a PIII 750 in a similar configuration. Actually, it has 2 XP boot/partitions as well as the 2003; one is an upgrade from 98, the other is a clean install. I don't use that machine much anymore but it proved quite useful as a lab.
    The real bottleneck though would be ram. You would do best to have at least 512MB, though for a clean install only for lab work, you may get away with 256MB. Have at least 5GB available HD space, though 10 or 20 would probably be best.

    The laptop has XP but it has gotten real slow lately with all the XP updates. It has only 256MB.
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  • Jonboy76Jonboy76 Inactive Imported Users Posts: 10 ■□□□□□□□□□
    I have an old 500MHz Athlon desktop computer (which I would install XP on and use as a client), and then a Pentium M laptop, which I am going to install 2K3 server on. Will this be enough to do the labs? or will I need another computer? and/or a better one? Just wondering how many computers (total) I will need to do the lab sufficiently. I should be getting the MSPress 70-290 book in the mail today so I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks in advance. :)
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  • Danman32Danman32 Member Posts: 1,243
    That would be fine for most excercises, but you may want to put a VM on the laptop an have 2 servers running for other excercises. You'll need sufficient RAM to get that to work properly.

    I have successfully used a PIII 750 with 512MB of ram to run a W2K3 server, and it runs XP fine too.

    My PIII laptop however is struggling with XP. It could be that I only have 256MB of RAM on it which used to be sufficient, or the system isn't running optimally since my battery is shot. HD access seems to sound slow, judging by the sound of the head movements.
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  • TheShadowTheShadow Member Posts: 1,057 ■■■■■■□□□□
    Many PIII laptops would slow the system clock down to conserve battery power if the battery showed low voltage, if that is what you mean by optimally. If the laptop will work with the battery removed, you might try that. Optionally finding a utility that checks clock speed might tell you something.
    Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of technology?... The Shadow DO
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  • geekiegeekie Member Posts: 391
    MS Virtual Server works well for me, I got 2GB RAM in my PC and have five VM's, one XP Client, two member servers and two DC's. Download it free here

    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/default.mspx
    Up Next : Not sure :o
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