Starting down the MCITP path

Hi!

I'm Sunny Sahota and I've just started down the MCITP:SA path as a requirement for my new job

I have just received my MSPress books from the trusty Amazon and have already begun trawling though this site bookmarking relevant pages like the stickies with a list of resources.

My first questions is related to the Labs and the best route you guys would recommend.
I have one main PC and a laptop.

The PC specs are:
Core i7 930 (overclocked to 4.2GHz)
ASUS Sabertooth x58 motherboard
6GB RAM (CAS 8 1600MHz)
2TB Western Digital Caviar Green SATA 6 HDD

Laptop (Acer Aspire 7540G) Specs are:
AMD 2.1GHz M300 Athlon
500GB HDD
4BG RAM

Currently I have Windows 7 installed on one partition on the 2TB HDD with Server 2008 R2 installed on another partition on the 2TB HDD.

I'm thinking of adding another 6GB RAM to the main PC and taking the virtual route (Hyper-V most probably), although would like to get your opinions on what you guys think of this plan and the best way to utilise the hardware I have available.
I can also grab a PC off a mate if necessary, he had agreed to let me use it for my course if need be.

Thanks for your time,
Sunny

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demonfurbie

add more ram to the pc and a bigger hard drive (if not a raid) and set it up to use rdp from your laptop

one thing i will add make sure your host os (the one running the vms) has the smallest resource requirement so all the resources can go to the vms

SunnySahota

demonfurbie wrote: »

add more ram to the pc and a bigger hard drive (if not a raid) and set it up to use rdp from your laptop

one thing i will add make sure your host os (the one running the vms) has the smallest resource requirement so all the resources can go to the vms

Would 12GB be sufficient? Reading through the intro to 70-640 it says i won't be required to run more than 4 virtual machines at any given time so if I allocate 2GB RAM to each vm (4x2=8GB used) leaving the host with 4GB RAM.
I will probably stick to a single large hard drive as this PC is shared with the family and it makes managing the hard disks easier than running a RAID with other users swapping out hard drives.

demonfurbie

SunnySahota wrote: »

Would 12GB be sufficient? Reading through the intro to 70-640 it says i won't be required to run more than 4 virtual machines at any given time so if I allocate 2GB RAM to each vm (4x2=8GB used) leaving the host with 4GB RAM.
I will probably stick to a single large hard drive as this PC is shared with the family and it makes managing the hard disks easier than running a RAID with other users swapping out hard drives.

id say 12 is fine but normally you can find 16 on sale for only a little bit more than 12

as for hard drives its not that hard to setup a raid and once its set you can forget its even a raid

edit: make sure your motherboard can handle 16 gig of ram some stop out at 8

SunnySahota

demonfurbie wrote: »

id say 12 is fine but normally you can find 16 on sale for only a little bit more than 12

as for hard drives its not that hard to setup a raid and once its set you can forget its even a raid

edit: make sure your motherboard can handle 16 gig of ram some stop out at 8

the x58 chipset is triple channel so with 6GB in there I can add 12GB more taking it up to 18GB which should be plenty.

The other thing is I'm looking at building a new rig for myself in a month or so, and might just add 6GB (12GB total) for now and holf off until I get my own system. That way I can use all three systems.

dave330i

It's a lab environment, so give each vm the min requirements. I'm running 8 win2k8 servers on a esxi server with 4 gig RAM.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 System Requirements

SunnySahota

dave330i wrote: »

It's a lab environment, so give each vm the min requirements. I'm running 8 win2k8 servers on a esxi server with 4 gig RAM.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 System Requirements

So if I wanted to take the EXSi route I would have to install EXSi on a partition, boot into the newly installed EXSi server and begin creating win2k8 servers, assigning the minimum requirements or thereabouts?

Thanks for your reply

cyberguypr

dave330i wrote: »

It's a lab environment, so give each vm the min requirements. I'm running 8 win2k8 servers on a esxi server with 4 gig RAM.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 System Requirements

Agree. Assigning more RAM is nice if you have it but it is definitely not required. The lab experience may be slightly slower but not a showstopper.

kriscamaro68

SunnySahota wrote: »

the x58 chipset is triple channel so with 6GB in there I can add 12GB more taking it up to 18GB which should be plenty.

The other thing is I'm looking at building a new rig for myself in a month or so, and might just add 6GB (12GB total) for now and holf off until I get my own system. That way I can use all three systems.

If you are adding ram you need to have the same ram size, speed, and preferably maker. You wouldnt want to add 12gb to the 6gb you would want to add 6gb to 6gb for a total of 12 or ditch it all together and get 24gb. (4gb sticks) As for the vm's I prefer to have an hd per vm so they are not sharing the hd between vm's. If you get more than 2 vm's running on a single hd it slows way down. Also the green drive you have is already pretty slow, as those usually run at 5900 rpm or less and go into a powered down state (hence the green status) and that slows things up as they have to wake from a powered down state.

Here is what I would get: Newegg.com - AMS DS-526SSBK 2.5" x6 SATA Backplane Module
Newegg.com - SAMSUNG Spinpoint MP4 HM320HJ 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Buy the drive bay that can fit 6 2.5" hd's in 1 dvd drive bay and buy as many of the 2.5" hd's that you can afford and allocate each hd to a vm or two and you will actually enjoy running vm's rather than screaming at your computer cause its so slow.

coty24

Thats exactly what I'm doing. RDP from my netbook

SunnySahota

coty24 wrote: »

Thats exactly what I'm doing. RDP from my netbook

Quick question, which would you recommend:

1) running vmware in windows 7 and installing ws2k8 r2 on a vm?

2) installing ws2k8 r2 on the hard drive and using Hyper-V to create the vm's?

Thanks,
Sunny

demonfurbie

SunnySahota wrote: »

Quick question, which would you recommend:

1) running vmware in windows 7 and installing ws2k8 r2 on a vm?

2) installing ws2k8 r2 on the hard drive and using Hyper-V to create the vm's?

Thanks,
Sunny

installing a linux and running your vms from there, mint linux is very user friendly and it takes about as much system recources at windows 98

SunnySahota

demonfurbie wrote: »

installing a linux and running your vms from there, mint linux is very user friendly and it takes about as much system recources at windows 98

I will try it out. Used Mint 10 for about a week and have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how user-friendly it was.

But out of the two options above, which would be the most favoured one?

universalfrost

just go to ebay and get a server.... i scored a 2950 and a 2850 off ebay for $195 and $100 with drives and enough memory to build several VM's.

you would be suprised how cheap a complete 2850 or even an sc1450 (yes you can run 2k8r2 on it) is going for right now! just make sure it you go for a 2850 you get the service tag from the seller to make sure it is 2k8r2 capable (some of the really old ones are not IIRC).

kriscamaro68

SunnySahota wrote: »

Quick question, which would you recommend:

1) running vmware in windows 7 and installing ws2k8 r2 on a vm?

2) installing ws2k8 r2 on the hard drive and using Hyper-V to create the vm's?

Thanks,
Sunny

I would run 2k8 with Hyper-V so you can learn the basics of Hyper-V as well.

SunnySahota

universalfrost wrote: »

just go to ebay and get a server.... i scored a 2950 and a 2850 off ebay for $195 and $100 with drives and enough memory to build several VM's.

you would be suprised how cheap a complete 2850 or even an sc1450 (yes you can run 2k8r2 on it) is going for right now! just make sure it you go for a 2850 you get the service tag from the seller to make sure it is 2k8r2 capable (some of the really old ones are not IIRC).

You mean something along the lines of this;
Dell Poweredge 2950 III Rackmount 2U Server Dual Quad Core 2.33Ghz 16GB 73GB SAS | eBay

SunnySahota

universalfrost wrote: »

just go to ebay and get a server.... i scored a 2950 and a 2850 off ebay for $195 and $100 with drives and enough memory to build several VM's.

you would be suprised how cheap a complete 2850 or even an sc1450 (yes you can run 2k8r2 on it) is going for right now! just make sure it you go for a 2850 you get the service tag from the seller to make sure it is 2k8r2 capable (some of the really old ones are not IIRC).

You mean something like this;
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Poweredge-2950-III-Rackmount-2U-Server-Dual-Quad-Core-2-33Ghz-16GB-73GB-SAS-/180731098338?pt=UK_Computing_Networking_SM&hash=item2a1469b4e2#ht_500wt_1287

which isn't bad at all for sub £400

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

I would run 2k8 with Hyper-V so you can learn the basics of Hyper-V as well.

I had a go at installing hyper-v this morning and I have to say it was very easy and straightforward to get a vm set up with server core installed

I think it may be the best option.

joehalford01

I'm running Windows 7 with vmware server 2.0. Works really well and was easy to set up. I tried setting it up with Linux at first but I finally gave up after a full weekend of not getting it working. I wanted the virtual machines to learn MCITP and my linux skills are amateur at best, so I had to move on, lol.

SunnySahota

joehalford01 wrote: »

I'm running Windows 7 with vmware server 2.0. Works really well and was easy to set up. I tried setting it up with Linux at first but I finally gave up after a full weekend of not getting it working. I wanted the virtual machines to learn MCITP and my linux skills are amateur at best, so I had to move on, lol.

I'm running both setups at the moment. I've got my windows 7 installed on one partition, on which I am running vmware and have ws2k8 r2 set up on a vm, along with server core on another vm.

I also have ws2k8 r2 installed on its own partition with the hyper-v role installed (did that this morning) with a server core vm.

Both set-ups are working fine and I'm yet to come across a deciding factor, although using Hyper-V seems the better option because it'll give me an insight into something I will be using later down the line.
For now I'll carry on doing everything on both set-ups until I come across something that works better on one system than it does on the other. Plus, there's no harm in labbing everything twice