starting with 70-290

waltdee

Hi Guys,

I am going for my 70-290, i have no books yet, dvd's or a lab to study on. Thats where i need your help. I want to start by knowing what the minimum requirements are to build a lab that is good for all the practice labs of the book. the following are my desktop specs:

Dell Optiplex gx280
2gb ram
oh crap, lmao, i just noticed i have 1 GB left of HD space, never mind with the specs, i need a new HD.

still if you could post any lab details that helped you through the book, share it please. I am planning on just having one hard pc, the rest virtual pc. thx

category_five

waltdee wrote: »

Hi Guys,

I am going for my 70-290, i have no books yet, dvd's or a lab to study on. Thats where i need your help. I want to start by knowing what the minimum requirements are to build a lab that is good for all the practice labs of the book. the following are my desktop specs:

Dell Optiplex gx280
2gb ram
oh crap, lmao, i just noticed i have 1 GB left of HD space, never mind with the specs, i need a new HD.

still if you could post any lab details that helped you through the book, share it please. I am planning on just having one hard pc, the rest virtual pc. thx

Just as a baseline, I'm running Ubuntu on a Core2 Duo E6550 (Conroe) with 4 GB of RAM. I have 3 Server 2003 VM's running at a time using Sun VirtualBox, and it's fairly snappy. I dedicated 512 RAM and 4 GB HDD space to each VM, and I have Intel VT turned on in the BIOS.

As far as your system goes, it's probably a ~3 GHz Pentium 4. Some P4's support hardware virtualization, some don't. It's easy enough to test drive it without committing any money to it. Clear some HDD space, download Sun Virtualbox and burn an ISO image of your OS to your HDD. Install a few VM's of your OS (dont need to activate for this test drive), run a few simultaneously and see how it works. Ta-da!

This lets you test your machine without spending a dime and you'll get a feel for what you need to improve, be it a new MB/CPU/RAM, just RAM, or just clearing out your HDD clutter.