Setting up a Study Lab.

I will keep this as short as I can. My goal is to build a home Lab/Network for my MS exams (70-290 and upwards).
Here is where I am: I have just built a system with the following spec:

AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor
1GB DDR RAM
200GB IDE drive
EVGA Geforce 6200LE 128MB PCI-Express Graphic Card
Two 250 GB SATA drives that is attached to a SATA card.( intended for RAID 1)
Then I have my production (HOME) PC that is triple boot with (XP Home, XP Pro and Linux OS)

Here are the options I am considering:

A.Install Windows Server 2003 Server on the just built PC and use the XP Pro partition in my production machine as a client.
B.Build another stripped down XP Pro computer and use it as client and leave my production computer out of my Lab environment.
C.Add another GB of RAM in my new built machine and Install XP Pro it and then install Virtual PC 2004.

Any thoughts on the pros and cons of any of these setups will be greatly appreciated. For instance I understand that you cannot install W2K3 as a guest OS on Virtual PC 04, on the other hand I don’t know if you can install Windows client OS as guest OSs in Virtual Server 05. I know VMware is an alternative but I also understand that you are better of with Virtual PC/Server if you are new to virtual environment.

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Comments

bighornsheep

hmmm...you pretty much have the same machine I do.

My main machine is A64 3000+ with 1.5GB of RAM, I run WinXP Pro, and a WinXP Pro Virtual PC as client also.
I have a test server with P4 2.8Ghz with 1.5GB of RAM running Win2k3. I also put another win2k3 on a Virtual pc on the p4, and it runs fine.

your new server is fine, even if you add just another 512mb to it, it's good enough for a win2k3 + winxp pro virtual client. If you want, you can use your prod machine as a second client.

good luck, have fun~

hhisgett

If you want, you can download VMWare server and use it for free now.

http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

This is what I use for my entire windows test lab (which is just a few machines) and it works very well.

kujayhawk93

okason wrote:

Here are the options I am considering:

A.Install Windows Server 2003 Server on the just built PC and use the XP Pro partition in my production machine as a client.
B.Build another stripped down XP Pro computer and use it as client and leave my production computer out of my Lab environment.
C.Add another GB of RAM in my new built machine and Install XP Pro it and then install Virtual PC 2004.

In my case, I went with B. We had a couple old P3 machines at work that my boss said I could have, so I'm using those as XP clients. I'm sure the virtual PC stuff works fine, but I like having full-blown servers and clients to work with, it simulates the work environment much better.

Orion82698

hhisgett wrote:

If you want, you can download VMWare server and use it for free now.

http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

This is what I use for my entire windows test lab (which is just a few machines) and it works very well.

Great idea!

Okason

Thank you all for your contributions, I think BigHorn I am going to setup ur kind of enviroment, W2K3 in one box and XP Pro in another box and then install Virtual Server and Virtual PC on them respectively. This way I can play with one client domain in a real world enviroment and multiple client domain in virtual enviroment.

Either way I got to invest in some hardware....In IT its always investing in something..books, training,hardware, software....something......thats the way the fun and the $$$ comes..

amyamandaallen

I got away with just using a celeron 800 ( overclocked to 840mhz

),512ram, and 3x10gb HDD ( for the RAID bits ) and an eval of 2003 r2. ( OK maybe thats why I took 4 months

)

Most of the things I needed to try from my training videos I did straight on the server. When I needed to be a client I used a remote session but to myself and tabbed between the 2. Its fine for 99% of stuff, group pols, IIS, profiles etc. However, I get to use most of this in a real work place everyday so maybe thats why I didnt need 2 pc's