lab vs labsim

demonfurbie

i was wondering how labsim stacked up vs a real lab

i do most of my studies at work and a little at home so i think a lab computer would be impractical, how ever if labsim isnt as good i may have to rethink it.

lochmoigh

Most of the labsims are very specific, not a lot of room to play around. They do a good job of showing you how to do it but not really that good for troubleshooting or adding to/modifying the parameters.

Tackle

lochmoigh wrote: »

Most of the labsims are very specific, not a lot of room to play around. They do a good job of showing you how to do it but not really that good for troubleshooting or adding to/modifying the parameters.

Agreed. I know that when I was using labsim for 70-642, it was very limited with what you could do...but then again it was just going through steps they had just shown for the most part.

Get a VM or 2 setup and you should be set to go.

demonfurbie

LucasMN wrote: »

Agreed. I know that when I was using labsim for 70-642, it was very limited with what you could do...but then again it was just going through steps they had just shown for the most part.

Get a VM or 2 setup and you should be set to go.

well i cant do vms thats the issue ... and being an office i cant bring in a tower to setup every day and take home at the end of the day

Bloogen

Access your home lab through remote desktop?

demonfurbie

i was thinking that but would the lag be tooo bad

had any one done that? have a virtual lam and remote into it from a different location over the internet

jyrki.arpiainen

demonfurbie wrote: »

i was thinking that but would the lag be tooo bad

had any one done that? have a virtual lam and remote into it from a different location over the internet

Yes, works fine. Of course in some scenarios it wont work, like when companys security policy is too tight etc...

I have 3,2Ghz dual core CPU, 8Gt 800Mhz RAM and approx 1,5TB hd space.
Machine runs Srv2008R2 and i use Hyper-V mainly because it is part of the subjects in MCITP: EA (70-643).

Some time ago when i was participating to a course which was held in commercial educational company, i felt that course was too undemanding and i knew that stuff already.. so i used RDP from that class room to connect to my own labs which were running on my server at home.

There's practically no extra lag depending how many virtual machines there is running at the host or how much CPU load there is (unless load is constantly at 100%). RPD takes that same bandwidht whether you look idle machine or ones with the heavy load through it.

My connection was 2Mb down / 2Mb up. Meant for cases like mine, home server use. It's good to have some up bandwidht in this kind of use.. 2Mb up is good when comparing to most common cheap choices like 2Mb/512kt or 8Mb/1Mb etc.

I had ADSL modem turned to bridge mode, then came Zywall 2 firewall (with port forwards configured), and behind that was RRAS server which directed traffic in certain ports to those clients i wanted.
There was actually double functionality as both Zywall 2 and RRAS in that server were capable to direct traffic to certain IP's and ports. Anyhow, main point was to do things in practise and experiment so it was allowed...

That way i could take RDP sessions from outside directly to different machines in my home network. In the "name of the remote computer" in DRP session i just used ports combined with the IP like: xx.xxx.xxx.xx:8188 for one machine and xx.xxx.xxx.xx:8199 to another.
I had fixed IP back then, which helped a lot but it is not absolute necessity.

One case i tried gave me lag though. It was when i took one RDP session to RRAS server and from there taking second session to another machine in the network.. and when i looked THAT over WAN i noticed it was a bit too slow. But there is no sense to use it that way, i was just experimenting.. . .

some guy

Nothing beats a good actual lab computer or VM, but I think Labsim is closely the next best thing, and is convenient since all you need for it is your browser and Microsoft Silverlight to run it.

hbbnt

you can also do Microsoft labs at work
Windows 7 Virtual Labs