70-246 lab requirements and NAS recommendation

I'm about to start labbing the 70-246 exam and will eventually also be attempting the 70-247. Does anyone have an idea of how many servers I should expect to create for a decent lab? I currently have two machines that I will be creating everything on, I want to make sure that it will be enough, otherwise I may have to use some work VMs for part of this.

Also, any recommendations for cheap NAS devices that have 4 drives and support raid 5? I'd like to use one NAS device for the majority of the storage for the lab in my home network.

Any additional resources for this lab would be appreciated too, currently I'm mostly just gathering info from TechNet and the labs that Microsoft has made available.

Thanks!

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ITMonkey

I too initially thought of labbing as buying at least two PCs or servers, a SAN or NAS (iSCSI?), and a used cisco switch to connect them. No longer do I think that way. I have yet to find a lab environment that I can't virtualize. You just have to think things through.

Want to practice configuring failover clusters?... how about creating 3 vms within a hyper-v host, where two servers are your virtual host servers, and the remaining server is configured as an iSCSI server. Network them using a private virtual network. Want to set up a tiered WDS and WSUS enterprise environment? That is doable within a single hyper-v host. Want to practise making a RAID fileserver? ... create a vm server with several vhds attached (they will appear in MMC as physical HDDs. Of course, you would not do any of this in a production environment. But for practising configuration and labbing scenarios, you will be fine. On the rare occasions where you just must have the real physical device (say for example configuring a lan adapter for nic teaming), buy the hardware if you must.

You just gotta think things through and ask yourself (or others on this board): How could I make this using virtual machines?

crrussell3

While I can't comment on the W2k12 exams, I know for W2k8 you needed anywhere from 2-7 vms to recreate some of the labs they wanted you to do. Most of the time you can get away with 2-4 vms.

If your hardware supports it, your best off doing virtual machines for your labs. Using Virtual Box (for shared computer) or Hyper-V on a standalone box will suffice. You can typically spin up 3 vms per harddrive without too much of a performance hit, and can even stretch it to 5 if they don't require much usage at the same time.

Also, you posted your question in the 2008 forum instead of 2012

Essendon

Here's an excellent thread about the same topic but in the 2012 forums > http://www.techexams.net/forums/mcsa-mcse-windows-2012-general/84579-resources-lab-mcse-private-cloud.html

flurrball

Doh, my mistake, didn't even realize there was a 2012 section already set up, any way I can move my thread there?

And I guess I should have been a little more specific, I meant I had two machines that were very capable of running several VMs each depending on what they are. I am trying to set up a relatively complex lab since I'll be working on this cert and the 70-247 in the future so I was just looking for a ballpark figure of VMs I would need. I also already have OSs on both machines, so I'd have to use Virtual Box or VMWare Workstation for all my lab machines, just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to run into any major headaches.

I expected somewhere in the range of 7-12 VMs, and I'm running low on HD space, which was why I was asking about a nice self-contained NAS for all the VMs. VMs from my other cert labs are started to get sprawled over 3 or 4 raid arrays I already have in my main study PC, and I'd like to consolidate most of my VM stuff onto its own separate box, since I don't necessarily even care about backing it up for lab purposes.

flurrball

Exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

Looks like I'll have to make everything inside Workstation or an ESX host if I can find an extra one, I suspect I'm a little light on hardware for the storage side and may need to split the VMs across both machines, but at least I know what to expect.

Essendon wrote: »

Here's an excellent thread about the same topic but in the 2012 forums > http://www.techexams.net/forums/mcsa-mcse-windows-2012-general/84579-resources-lab-mcse-private-cloud.html

crrussell3

For labs are you using Differencing disks (or vmware equivalent)? In virtualbox you can setup Multi-attach, which is what I have been using without a issues. Big space saver.

As for a NAS, I don't have any experience beyond enterprise except for my Unraid (which is best suited for HTPC and is how I use it).

Essendon

Not a problem, here's my lab setup.

- HP DL380 G5 server with 32GB RAM and tons of SAS disk space. OS is Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-v role is installed. This runs most of my VM's SCOM, SCVMM, Orchestrator, DPM and SCCM. There's also a 2008 R2 domain controller for AD DS to my VM's. Another VM provides iSCSI SAN using a software SAN (Starwind).
- A HP desktop machine with an E6550 processor, 8GB RAM and 2 SATA disks. Also runs Server 2012 with Hyper-v role installed. This runs the remaining System Center VM's, your App Controller and Orchestrator.

All these VM's are on the same switch so there's no issue with comms between them. I used Hyper-v so I could get experience with it, I recommend this to you too. You can run the VM's in Workstation or ESXi, but why not get experience with Hyper-v too.

What's the config of your machines? RAM, disk, processor?

flurrball

crrussell3 wrote: »

For labs are you using Differencing disks (or vmware equivalent)? In virtualbox you can setup Multi-attach, which is what I have been using without a issues. Big space saver.

As for a NAS, I don't have any experience beyond enterprise except for my Unraid (which is best suited for HTPC and is how I use it).

I actually hadn't considered using this but seems like it'd definitely save me some space if I end up using some of my extra HDs for a few VMs.

I'm trying to avoid using my company's hardware for now if I can, and I was considering something like FreeNAS for the storage, guess I'll see what kind of storage requirements I start running into as I start setting it up.

geek4god

You have any performance issues with the HP DL380 G5 Server? I see you can grab them online used pretty cheap.

Essendon wrote: »

Not a problem, here's my lab setup.

- HP DL380 G5 server with 32GB RAM and tons of SAS disk space. OS is Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-v role is installed. This runs most of my VM's SCOM, SCVMM, Orchestrator, DPM and SCCM. There's also a 2008 R2 domain controller for AD DS to my VM's. Another VM provides iSCSI SAN using a software SAN (Starwind).
- A HP desktop machine with an E6550 processor, 8GB RAM and 2 SATA disks. Also runs Server 2012 with Hyper-v role installed. This runs the remaining System Center VM's, your App Controller and Orchestrator.

All these VM's are on the same switch so there's no issue with comms between them. I used Hyper-v so I could get experience with it, I recommend this to you too. You can run the VM's in Workstation or ESXi, but why not get experience with Hyper-v too.

What's the config of your machines? RAM, disk, processor?

flurrball

I've got:

- A desktop with a Core i7-2600K slightly OC'd, 24GB RAM, local SSD HD(300GB) and local sata HD(500GB), as well as a network drive (1TB) and several USB external drives I've been juggling VMs on.

- An HP laptop w/ Core i7-2670QM, 8GB RAM, local SSD (~500GB), and several 1TB external drives for it.

I agree on the Hyper-V, my experience is more based in VMWare environments, so I'd benefit from using it all I can.

Sounds like I may be a little low on the CPU/RAM side since these are really not server-level CPUs, I could probably add another 8-12GB of RAM to the desktop and just make sure I use all my network/local/usb HDs efficiently.

Think that would be enough to get 8-10 VMs and get a proper lab going? I'm actually looking to spend a good deal of time messing with SCVMM and the private cloud stuff as I get a little more familiar with the whole family of solutions.

Essendon

@geek4god, no it can easily handle plenty of VM's (say from 5-15) depending on their resource allocations of course. The G5 DL380 is a workhorse and it can handle all my VM's with ease. Chuck in as much RAM as you cal lay your hands on and your good.

@flurrball, that's enough to get you going. The i7 makes for a great lab processor, thing is the VM's arent doing much most of the time even when they are all on. 24GB + 8GB RAM is enough to get you going.

When you go into download the System Center 2012 suite, ensure you get SP1 because plain System Center 2012 cant manage 2012 hosts. The big part of the Private Cloud cert is to get all the components speaking with each other. Individually they may work a treat, but you need to get them to work together.

ITMonkey

I agree with everything that has been said. Just a nit to add to the great conversation: hyper-v creates dynamic disks unless you specify fixed, differencing, or pass-through. The initial HDD allocationfor a dynamic vhd is a few megabytes, so you may not need a whole lot of hdd space. If you do saves or many snap-shots of the system state, you'll begin chewing up using significantly more hdd.

My lab machine has a raid 0 arrangement of two 128 GB SSDs for containing the guest vm vhds and configuration and the rest. Being concerned about running out of room on the SSD raid, as well as for backup purposes, i export vms to a 2 TB drive that is used for backup and general data storage. Having SSDs for the vm system drives makes labbing a breeze. For the native-boot of the host lab machine, I have an HDD with several vhd's on it containing whatever OS I want to be the host OS to be.

A valid argument could be made that I should not be using SSDs for the system drives of the guest vm's. I am not running the lab machine 2x7, and if the SSDs last 2 to 4 years, I'll consider their cost to be worth it.

GDL-LC

I use two of these

HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer | Ebuyer.com

Upgraded to 8GB of ram each, ESXi running 5VM's each currently.