Moving into Servers

AJJ28

Hello,

I want to move into server certications but don't have a lot of experience with them and therefore wanted to start with the most basic certification. Am I right in thinking 70-640 is the most basic and a good place to start?

Also, I wanted to set up a small virtual network using a laptop so that I have some thing practical to fall back on. How crazy does getting a laptop with VirtualBox on it and running a couple of virtual Vista/7 machines on it sound?

Could I run exchange, dns, dhcp, and active directory from that one virtual server? Thanks

earweed

Probably not exchange but the others are easy. You didn't say how powerful or how much RAM you have. Without at least 4 GB RAM you have trouble with over 2 VMs and also you can't run Server 2008 R2 VMs with virtual box (I don't think, not sure) as it's only available as 64 bit. You also may want to consider having more than 1 HDD as rhese VMs have a lot of I/O and a seperate HDD for each VM (if possible) makes them run a lot faster.

spd3432

AJJ28,

I'll leave answering the first part to someone else. Most of the guided labs (Sybex, Microsoft, etc) for training purposes have you load as many roles onto a single device as possible. Its normal to set up a lab environment with a single domain controller running AD DS, DNS, and DHCP. Its not usually recommended, even in a lab, to have exchange running on your domain controllers because of port conflicts (multiple items vying for access to the LDAP port 389).

I have an older Compaq laptop with 4gb ram. At one point while labbing for exchange 2003 (that exam is now retired), I had the following machines running in VMWare workstation (I'm not sure how well virtualbox stacks up against it):

1 Server 2003 AD DS, DHCP, DNS (Contoso)
1 Server 2003 running Exchange 2003 (Contoso)
1 Server 2003 RRAS server (3 NICS)
1 Server 2003 "internet" root DNS server
1 Server 2000 AD DS, DHCP, DNS (Litware)
1 Server 2000 running Exchange 5.5 (Litware)
2 XP workstations (one in Contoso, one in Litware) with Outlook sending emails between domains

It all ran slowly and I had two external USB hard drives hosting the disks for two of the virtual machines each but I had it working and even did migration between the exchange 5.5 and exchange 2003 systems.

You use what you have available to you. If that means you have to host multiple roles, then do so. The more memory you have available, the more virtual machines you'll be able to run and the more realistic your labs will be.

sean

AJJ28

Thanks Gents...I appreciate the time you spent replying. Everyone else is welcome