70-680 - Need Help with lab setup.

im_nightrider2003im_nightrider2003 Member Posts: 13 ■□□□□□□□□□
in Windows 7 exams
Hello I have now failed the 70-680 exam twice and that's the only thing standing between my WGU BS degree and me. Based on my reading and several threads I have decided to set up my own lab to try things out extensively. My existing laptop configuration is given below. Please let me know if this laptop will be able to host three virtual machines simultaneously. Also please let me know any resources or thread where I can find information on setup and configuration of server, Clients(2), network, AD/DS etc. CPU: Intel Core I5 M480 2.66 GHZ 6 GB RAM. 64 BIT Windows operating system (Home premium) Thanks and the help is appreciated.
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  • sratakhinsratakhin Member Posts: 818
    I used VMware Workstation when preparing for the exam. I have 2 Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs (one is a DC, one is a member dervice), and three Windows 7 clients. All machines run fine with just 512 MB of RAM, so your laptop will do fine. My DC has 2 virtual NICs with RRAS so that all VMs can get out on the Internet. The "external" Nic can use either NAT or bridged networking. The "internal" NIC is host-only. Other VMs connect to this host-only network and use the DC as their default gateway and DNS.
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  • PsoasmanPsoasman Member Posts: 2,687 ■■■■■■■■■□
    I've used virtual box for most of my labbing. For the 680 exam, labbing is critical. For scenarios, you can use the exercises in the various books available, or make up your own based on the exam objectives.

    My typical setup is a DC, member server, and 2 clients. Your laptop should be fine, I had 4 servers running on 750 MB of RAM for federation services and it was slow, but it worked.
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  • EasyMac308EasyMac308 Member Posts: 57 ■■□□□□□□□□
    My lab setup is a Thinkpad T61 / Core2Duo T7300 @2GHz / 4GB RAM / 320GB HDD. For software, I'm running 2008 R2 with Hyper-V for virtualization. It's just about right as long as I keep it under four machines up on light duty. I did 680 and 686 on this setup and I'm working on 640 now. My main bottleneck is the HDD since the MS Press book has a lot of machines and I'd rather not start from scratch if I go back to review.

    If you throw VMWare Workstation on your current machine I don't see any reason why it couldn't run the number of VMs you're looking to do.
    Currently Reading: A cereal box
    BS:IT student at WGU - 81/120 CU done as of 6/2016
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