Darkerz MCITP:EA Journal.

I have officially migrated from the Windows 7 Forum to collaborate with the lovely folks here for the next 8-10 months!

My goal is to dig right into the Network Infrastructure exam and skill set. I was curious what others had set up as a lab? Currently I have one xw9400 Workstation beast; dual quad core opterons on 16gigs of memory and 8 NIC ports (10/100 only, 2 gigabit built in to the mobo, 10 total).

I think this will be sufficient for VM's.

SO! Time to get started. Check in here often; for the next 2 weeks I am still unemployed (Soon to change) and going to be spending... a lot... Of time working on my studies, labbing it up and posting results and lessons learned here.

I can't wait.

Step 1 Day 1; Purchase books from Borders. I know, I feel old but... The batteries on my books LAST FOREVER!

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citinerd

I too am starting my studies in the MCITP side of things. I am going to get SA then EA though.

My lab is one quad core PC with ESXi 4.1 16gb ram and single gigabit card. It has 1 40gb hdd for ESXi and 2 1.5tb drives in Raid 0 for performance (Two 1.5tb volumes since ESXi won't recognize anything larger). I also have 2 1 space P4 physical servers in my desktop rack. The problem with the physical servers is no 64bit but I think I'll be fine.

Zentraedi

I'd suggest going for the 70-640 before the 70-642. If I had done that, the latter would have been so much easier.

As for books, definitely pick up the Windows 2k8 Resource Kit and start reading the Active Directory book cover to cover. Also make sure to get the MS Press PKI And Certificate Security book.

Here's my lab. I'm kinda debating whether or not to spring for another SSD now or wait since the next generation of SSDs is coming out soon.

office:
1 2.53 GHz Macbook Pro w/ 8GB RAM, 2 internal SSDs(intel G2 160 GB Crucial 256 GB) , no DVD drive
1 MacBook CoreDuo
1 MSI Wind Network...almost never used.

For my main workstation:
Dell U2711 27" 2560x1440
Mitsubishi 23" 1920x1080
ASUS Dual Xeon motherboard w/ iKVM and max mem capacity of 144GB
Dual 2.27GHz E5520 Xeon processors
24 GB of ECC RAM (6 sticks)
USB3.0/SATA 6gbps HBA
5x 2 TB HDD (internal storage in hot swap bays)
2x USB 3.0 HD docks (currently 1x 2TB HDD attached)
2x80 Intel G2 SSDs (boot)
2xCrucial C300 SSD 64 GB drives (VM storage)
3x USB Gigabit NICs
Sennheiser HD 595s
APC 1200VA UPS
1x Dell 2808 Managed(web no serial) 8 port switch w/ VLAN and Link Aggregation support
1x Buffalo 8 port unmanaged gigabit switch

e-Mobile 3G MiFi

On the other side of the room I have a 28U Skeletek rack with:

1 Brother 5380 DN network laser printer
1x Dell 2808 Managed(web no serial) 8 port switch w/ VLAN and Link Aggregation support
1x Buffalo 8 port unmanaged gigabit switch
Cisco 2511 router (Terminal server duty)
Cisco 2611 XM router w/ NM-HD-2V, FXO and FXS cards, AIM-CUE
Cisco 2611 XM w/ NM-8A/S
Cisco 2620 XM w/ NM-8A/S
3x Cisco 2950 24 port switches

4U VM server (new build)
2 keyboards (Japanese and English)
Running Hyper-V
1x Xeon X3440
16 GB RAM (soon to be 32 GB!)
2x Crucial C300 128 GB SSDs
1x 2 TB HDD
Intel quad gigabit NIC
Supermicro motherboards w/ iKVM 2x intel gigabit NICs onboard (onboard NICs have issues with Hyper-V)

Balantine

Hey Darkerz... I'm in the same boat.

I'm running a HP Elitebook 8440p, 8GB RAM. Right now I'm dual-booting Win7 Ult. with Server 2008R2 installed into a VHD. I have Hyper-V role installed, and SP1 solved my hypervisor/video issues as a result of DEP and Intel-VT. On the Win7 side, because I prefer the graphics/Aero to read PDF's, I'm just using VMWare Workstation.

Looking forward to reading your posts and, perhaps, collaborating a bit!