Labs for 70-680-Any suggestions?

I’m preparing for my 1^st cert and I chose MCST 70-680.

I know there have been other suggestions on labs on this forum, but with so much information spread all out, I am lost with a concrete answer on how to prepare labs.

As of last night ( and while I’m at work), I installed VirtualBox. I saw this program used on a couple videos and I chose to use this.
As far as how to prepare the machines to get ready to get some hands on experience, I’m being tugged back and forth all over the net.

So far I have: 3 clients (2 Win7 Enterprise, 1 Win 8 Enterprise) and 1 server (Win Server 08 R2). All x64. (I also installed pfSense because of a video I was watching. Not sure if I even need it).

Now what? Good detailed suggestions are really appreciated.

Thanks in advance:)!

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nosoup4u

Your going to want a vista box to migrate or upgrade it to win7 also

Malita215

nosoup4u wrote: »

Your going to want a vista box to migrate or upgrade it to win7 also

Thank you. Creating now.

ITMonkey

I thrashed around myself the initial week or so of lab'ing, just as I sense you are. The state of the virtual machines became rather "messy" by the 3rd week, and I decided to start all over again from scratch. I recreated my Server 2008, and Windows clients (XP and Win7) from scratch, got them up to the most current SP level but did not authenticate them yet, nor did I make install any server roles. Next I installed RSAT, AIK, and WDT on the Win7 client. After all this, I made clones of all three virtual machines.

The clones were my "fresh" copy of the server and clients. Depending on how often I lab'ed and how much I changed, I would eventually trash the old vm images, make a clone of the clone, and start anew fresh.

I know several better ways to do this now. But that was good enough until I became familiar with the AIK and WDT toolsets. And the VirtualBox vm's could probably be defined as differential disks -- just as if this were a test environment. (Maybe snapshots would be appropriate too?) But for just getting out of the gate and begin lab'ing, cloning is the most simple and intuitive way to go.

I remember having problems/questions regarding how to successfully configure a network using VirtualBox. But that's for another day.