assistance with lab setup and course material

Does anyone here have experience with Careeracademy's training material? I am looking at the 70/680 exam. I am going to get Poulton's book as well as the command line reference books as well

My other question is regarding home lab setup. I am looking at getting a second physical box (my current machine is just my mac laptop with vmware fusion, the mac verison of vmware workstation), that will act as my DC and host a couple of VMs of windows 7. The two machines I am looking at are
Dell OptiPlex 9010 Small Form Factor - Intel Core i7 3.4GHz- 8GB RAM- 500GB HDD

(i will buy an additional set of RAM to take it from 8GB to 24 or 32GB)

XPS 8500

Is there any reason to get a business model over a consumer machine, provided the hardware fits the bill?

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Comments

ITMonkey

don't know why you would want to purchase a 2nd physical machine, as I imagine everything (DC, DNS, DHCP, servers and clients) might work well within a one or two vms.

A quick look at the Optiplex link provided showed a good lab machine, imho. My initial concern was whether the integrated nics had windows server drivers (it does, according to the intel site). The cpu is the same as the one in my physical lab machine. Didn't validate it, but i expect that the bios supports virtualization and DEP.

The amount of RAM (8Gb) was on the the modest side, but will work wonderfully for the 70-680 scenarios you will lab. Do yourself a favor and add an SSD to contain the virtual machines (config and vhd's). The vms will boot and work so much faster.

The initial question still stands. You can create a vm containing AD DS, with DNS and DHCP roles enabled. Then have a couple vms for windows clients. That should do fine without needing a 2nd machine.

jtphenom

I would like to set up a lab as well. But I only have one Windows 7 machine and cannot afford to purchase extra OS licenses to set up VMs with. Any cheap/free ways to go about doing this?

EasyMac308

For the amount of times you're going to be tearing down and imaging machines, just use the Win7 Enterprise demo from Microsoft. You can slmgr -rearm it a few times if absolutely necessary, but aside from the machine you're using as a technician computer you probably won't have anything running long enough to complain about activation, anyway.

jtphenom

OK but what about servers and such? Also, I have no idea how to set up a domain. Can I do all of this on one machine? lol

EasyMac308

If you don't know how to set up a domain, it's not *especially* hard, but also not particularly necessary unless you try labbing SCCM. The vast majority of the Win7 tests can be studied and labbed with a couple of Win7 machines, and maybe a 2008 member server.

You can easily do it all on one machine. I use an old beater IBM laptop as my lab machine (because I'm poor

) and it was just fine.

jtphenom

Oh I figured you had to have a domain set up in order to do the labs for the 685, since there is so much Group Policy stuff in there.

And what is a "member server"?

EasyMac308

To properly do group policy you will need a domain, that's true. 780 is mostly setup/deployment/troubleshooting, though, and is what you originally asked.

It definitely sounds to me like you're starting at the ground floor here. I'd suggest you check out the free technet lab guides here: Test Lab Guides - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki. Specifically, you'll want the Base Configuration TLG (Download Test Lab Guide: Base Configuration from Official Microsoft Download Center). For what you're doing, you can stop after "Configure DC1 as a domain controller and DNS Server".

That'll get you to a running DC. I'm not sure of all the differences in 685/686, but in 686 I had to lab a PXE server and DHCP for WDS, but you can burn that bridge when you get to it.

jtphenom

EasyMac308 wrote: »

To properly do group policy you will need a domain, that's true. 780 is mostly setup/deployment/troubleshooting, though, and is what you originally asked.

Oh that was someone else who started the thread. I guess I should have clarified in my post that I'm preparing for the 685.

It definitely sounds to me like you're starting at the ground floor here. I'd suggest you check out the free technet lab guides here: Test Lab Guides - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki. Specifically, you'll want the Base Configuration TLG (Download Test Lab Guide: Base Configuration from Official Microsoft Download Center). For what you're doing, you can stop after "Configure DC1 as a domain controller and DNS Server".

That'll get you to a running DC. I'm not sure of all the differences in 685/686, but in 686 I had to lab a PXE server and DHCP for WDS, but you can burn that bridge when you get to it.

Thanks friend!

EasyMac308

jtphenom wrote: »

Oh that was someone else who started the thread. I guess I should have clarified in my post that I'm preparing for the 685.

Ooops, my bad. Sorry for the mixup

.

You may consider reviewing the relevant portions of the 70-640 material for creating a DC, although it'll go more in depth than you need at this stage of the game.

jtphenom

I don't have the 640 material. lol

But I will figure it out. Thanks!!