Virtual Box setup for home lab

Oakparktech

Hello everyone,

Is this the proper way to setup a practice lab with virtual box. Basically this will be to play around with windows server 2008,2012 exchange etc...

My setup:
I have installed virtual box in windows 8 on my 1TB 16GB PC.
Next step was setup windows server at 50GB with 2GB RAM.
Question 1. Is this an efficient setup?

I wiped my SSD with kill disk and I can no longer see my SSD. I can see the SSD in disk management. Any thoughts?
I was going to store all my ISO images and VDI files on my SSD.
Question 2. Is this a good idea?


thanks

Essendon

There's no "proper" way to setup a lab really. What you have now should be okay, but your going to need more than 1 VM. Give 1GB RAM to begin with, then scale up if performance isnt satisfactory. Create a domain, join clients to the domain, install Exchange or whatever you want to play with.

I reckon you just need to give the SSD a drive letter, that's all. Keep your VM's on the SSD.

Google, google, and more google. Not being a jerk, but you'll learn waaaayyyy more by doing things yourself, breaking them, googling the issues, and fixing them. BEST way to learn. Then you always have TE, when you run into specific issues (say you cant join a client to your domain, or Kerberos is stuffed) post up, there are plenty of smart folks around to lend a helping hand.

Oakparktech

Thanks for the reply. In disk management, I created a new simple volume, NTFS and assign driver letter.

Again thank you.

DMV

Hi there,

I am currently working on MS Exam 70-686. I am installed Virt Box and created two VM - Server 2008 and Client Win7. And that about it. If you want to setup on Virtual Machine lab for some Domain, We can work together on that stuff.

spiderjericho

I actually ran into an issue with virtual box and Windows 8.1.

I updated to the latest virtual box and it "broke" my network connection on my laptop. When updating, it kept the old bridge and VB adapters and tried to create new ones.

I guess they changed the network stack in Windows 8. VMworkstation doesn't seem to have the same issue.

And it sounds like you need to go into disk manager to use the SSD.