Lab rentals or similar?

wweboy

Hi everyone,

I've been studying for the 70-640 for the last 3 weeks and I'm having no problem doing stuff in VMWare but I want to see tangible results. I currently have comcast and I don't want to purchase business class just to get two static IPs and stuff.

I know I could rent a VPS or something with Windows on it and practice that way and have wide open access to the net but seems kind of expensive .

Do you know of any place that would let me buy time on a server to play with server 08 run A-D and what not and practice in a some what more "real world environment"

Thanks.

Hyper-Me

I still do stuff out of my house with comcast. I find that as long as my modem stays online, I keep the same address lease for a long long time. Plenty long enough to do any kind of testing i need. (for instance, running an exchange server)

MentholMoose

Yes, your DHCP lease likely will last a long time. As far as simulating a more complex AD environment, though, you can probably do it in VMware (regardless of version). If you want to setup multiple sites to practice replication, you can create multiple networks and connect them through a VM configured as a router. For my MCITP studies, I used VMware Workstation, and I had three sites: two "main" sites with standard DCs, and one "branch office" site with an RODC. My "router" was a lightweight Linux VM. I setup a DHCP relay on to practice more complicated DHCP configuration on 2008.

Post the things you want to simulate and we can try to help with configuring it, if you are interested.

wweboy

I've had my dynamic IP stay the same for over a year I guess I'm watching the CBT Nuggets videos and I've planned my fake company. I've created a spreadsheet with the departments, names and groups and did all that.

I've made a "home" directory for everyone and theoretically the domain is ready for use. I'm just figuring out what next? I'm learning DNS and and I know its super important for AD and CA services and the like.

Getting the more boring parts of the video where its good to know but how often are you going to be domain trusts and stuff?

I still need to simulate the following

Setup DNS
Setup backup and recovery
Deploy a second domain and do domain trusts
deploy an xxx.domain.com site

I guess thats it overall I wanted to just make it "more real" feeling.

Thanks.

MentholMoose

What edition of VMware are you using, and what OS is the host (if applicable)?

For DNS, start with a single domain, DC and site, and go from there.

With VMware Workstation, you can use the network editor to add additional networks. Create new subnets on those new networks, and connect them to each other via a router. The router can be a VM with one interface on each network, and configured to forward traffic. This should be doable with a Windows VM (I used a Linux VM).

Once you have multiple networks configured and communicating, you can create additional sites, domains, and forests, and configure replication and trusts. I would start by adding one additional network and creating a new site in your existing domain to get practice with AD Sites and Services, and DNS/AD replication. Once you have this down, you can wipe out this network and reuse it, or create a new network, for setting up a subdomain. Once that is working, you can do a new forest.

For backup and recovery, you don't really need multiple networks. If you are using VMware Workstation, you can save/restore backups to/from a USB drive attached to a VM.

wweboy

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate X64 with VMWare workstation 7. What router software do you use like smooth wall?

Thanks!

Hyper-Me

MentholMoose wrote: »

=This should be doable with a Windows VM (I used a Linux VM).

RRAS feature in Windows Server will do this.

wweboy

I've got PFSense up and running in a VMWare its great. Thanks!