Starting my MCIPT Journy. Basic Questions.

Hey fellas..

Works pressing me to get my MCIPT so they can send me out my migrations/deployment's etc. I've allways been and will always be a networking guy at heart but paying the bills trumps all.. I have a couple questions:

Works supplied me a rack of 4 older HP G4's with dual proc's, enough drives and mem to get the job done. I'm going to setup DNS allow for my home lab to authenticate, join as child domains allowing me to study from home (just don't have the time to study at work). I need some assistance upping my home PC to par for adequacy. I've noticed my single SATA hard drive pc is sluggish (at best) when running 3+ DC's. It's a i7-920, 12gig, single hd home build. I was thinking about taking 2 or 3 80gig SATA drives home and just giving each VM DC it's own hard drive. Will that help with read time?

I've been paying attention to Microsoft certs for the past 10 years, studied 2000 and 2008 early on. This will be my first Microsoft rodeo, I was thinking about starting with the Active Directory exam for a foundational exam. thoughts?

How long should it take someone with average knowledge of most microsoft services and deployment methodologies to hit the ground running and gain their MCITP:SA with CBT Nugg's and the Cert books, study time ranging from 5-15 hours per week? 9 months?

Basic questions.. Thanks for any input..

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Comments

steve13ad

It all depends on you; but you could cover the topics of each exam in three months. It all depends on how quick you take to the information.

seekrit

Thanks for the reply...

Any suggestions about splitting up the VM images onto different hard disks to increase read time? When I was playing with 2008 pre-R2 a while ago, running 3+ DC's on a single 1.5tb barracuda made life miserable. Well maybe not miserable, but tested my patients on how long things would take to load when all my VM's were up..

Essendon

How much RAM did you assign to the VM's? With the kind of system you have there shouldnt be any issues that's if you had 2-3 hard disks. I'd suggest having smaller drives rather than one big one. The hard disk is usually the biggest bottleneck. If you had 3 500GB ones and had a VM on each, you'd be laughing. Another thing that's quite commonly suggested is the SSD. Though a little expensive you'll get much better performance if you had a couple of those (or even one) for your VM's. Hope this helps.

undomiel

Since this is just for a lab why not take those 3 drives and make a RAID 0 of it? Assuming you have a controller capable of doing that of course.

seekrit

undomiel wrote: »

Since this is just for a lab why not take those 3 drives and make a RAID 0 of it? Assuming you have a controller capable of doing that of course.

I don't have any issues with doing a raid 0. Most of the loose drives I can get my hands on from work are 80-240gig SATA2 WD drives. A 3 drive 7200 Raid 0 will perform better then just giving each DC it's own disk?

I've only been allocating 2gb to each DC.

rjs_essex

I would just get a small(ish) SSD - You will be amazed at the speed improvements especially if you are running multiple VMs simultaneously!

seekrit

I'd love to, but I don't have the budget for SSD(s). Not after the training materials and exam costs.. Works not flipping that bill.

Ch@rl!3m0ng

If you RAID the 7200 should be plenty fast enough for your purposes.

ptilsen

seekrit wrote: »

I don't have any issues with doing a raid 0. Most of the loose drives I can get my hands on from work are 80-240gig SATA2 WD drives. A 3 drive 7200 Raid 0 will perform better then just giving each DC it's own disk?

I've only been allocating 2gb to each DC.

Not necessarily. If all three VMs are generating I/O, there is no form of RAID that will give them better I/O than single disks, not even RAID 1 or 5 for read I/O only. Simultaneous disk access from multiple sources reduces performance exponentially.

Putting them all on a RAID 0 will increase overall performance when only one or to is generating significant I/O. RAID 5 would improve their read performance and destroy their write performance. Since you really don't care about the data, RAID 0 makes sense, but on the other hand, the chances of data loss in a three-drive RAID 0 are so high that the reality is you will likely find yourself rebuilding those VMs. If you have a backup, great. If you don't, forget it.

The biggest thing with virtual lab environments is RAM. Giving a couple of cores to each of your VMs is nice, but giving them 2-4GB of RAM each is nicer. That combined with your disk system is going to be what reduces the amount of time you're waiting for VMs.

seekrit

I'm just going to go with separate sata drives per vmware image. My motherboard only has 3 x 240 slots.. So the max I can go is 12gb..

Bought the MCTS Self-paced Training Kit (Exam 70-640) 2nd edition this afternoon on Amazon. Hopefully that paired with my CBT Nug's subscription will get me though my AD exam..

Hopefully..

/crosses fingers

MrAgent

I would definitely put those drives together in a RAID 0 config. Much faster than seperate drives.

ccnahelpme

how big are hyper v vm images? How big of a ssd drive should i buy to support those vms? i plan to do a dual boot of windows 7 and server 2008. thanks.

ccnahelpme

would i see significant performance speed gained by having server 2008 on the ssd and the vm images in 2 hdd running raid 0 or is it not much and I should just do a 2 hdd raid 0?