Help With 2008 R2 Lab Setup

Help I’m very green on Server 2008 or any Server OS’s I have just finished up 640 and need some advice.

I’m getting to a point that I need to start doing lab’s for my 640,642,643,646 and 647 Certifications.

I have two computers to lab with each has 16 gigs of ram and plenty of horse power to run multiple VM’s I also have three hard drives in each machine with one dedicated to VM’s .

For software I have multiple copies of Server 2008 R2 and VMWARE workstation.

My issue is that I run Windows 7 Business as the OS on the two computers and I run games and do other things with them I don’t want to run a VM of Server 2008 R2 and have it apply the OU’s and GPO’s to my Window 7 machines screwing stuff up to the point that I have to fix stuff all the time are reload.

I also have two other computers running Windows 7 Home premium all are connecting to the same router they having nothing to do with the labs I just don’t want the lab’s to affect them in anyway.

Am I wrong in thinking that the OU’s and GPO’s could apply to my Windows 7 Business computers causing headaches?

Would I be better off duel booting the computers and stick 2008 R2 as the second OS on my extra drives and run VM’s and lab in that environment?

The reason I’m using two computers to lab is I’m using the 70-640:Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Configuration with Lab Manual by Microsoft Official Academic Course book’s to lab with and they use two computers each machine has a RWDC on the main OS and RODC as a VM and a SODC as a VM. We use the same setup at my tech school. I have just received three new R2 books to study and lab with but I’m going to setup my lab using two computers.

Any advice would be helpful not sure if I really want to do hyper V at the moment been using VMWARE for the last few months and it’s been working pretty good.

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Comments

Krunchi

I was just thinking I would have to log on to the Domain for any of the Polices to take affect am I right?

If so then I guess I have nothing to worry about are do I?

spd3432

Krunchi wrote: »

I was just thinking I would have to log on to the Domain for any of the Polices to take affect am I right?

If so then I guess I have nothing to worry about are do I?

Correct -- any settings you make to GPOs will not affect the physical machines unless you make them members of your virtual domains. When I set up labs, I keep everything on private networks within vmware, choosing which virtual switches I connect the network cards to. Most of the time its all on a single network, but if you should decide to lab DirectAccess, I think there are five networks in use and you need to choose how to set them up.

I haven't managed to install hyper-v on a machine from within vmware so when you reach the point where you are labbing hyper-v servers, you may need to go to a dual boot setup with server 2008r2 as a bootable OS so you can install the hyper-v role.

Sean

ATL-TECH

Dual booting works just fine, use hyper V with server 2008 r2 as the host, am rocking 4gig with i3 laptop. so you should be good

pzero

I have the pretty much the same situation. This is how I setup my lab.

The "primary" OS is Windows 7 Ultimate - this gets used for every day normal non labbing stuffs.

Using the Boot from VHD functionality in Win7 I created a Win2K8R2 server in a VHD file and added that VHD to the boot menu. So when I need to lab - I just reboot into Server 2008 R2. Cause it has Hyper-V installed I can setup any required VM's that are required.

Krunchi

Thanks for the help I went with a Dual Boot using a VHD.

I tried to setup Hyper-V but could not get it to run on my new computer Intel 2600K sandy bridge and a ASRock P67 EXTREME4 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard. Thinking it may be the MB still looking into it.

If I can't get the Hyper-V working I'll just use VMware.

pzero

It could just be that your BIOS is not enabled for Intel-VT.

Hyper-V: Will My Computer Run Hyper-V? Detecting Intel VT and AMD-V - Taylor Brown's Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

There is software out there that will tell you if you machine is virtualisation ready.