Well I have finally had a few minutes last night to start rebuilding my lab environment.
I wanted to showcase many of the technologies that I have been working with over the past few years. My Lab rebuild includes the following technologies thus far:
Windows 2008 R2 SP1
Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Active Directory Native Mode
Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 5
SQL 2008 R2
SCCM 2007 R3 — Soon to be migrated to CM 2012
1E Nightwatchman – 6.0.500.152
1E Wakeup Server – 6.0.500.118
1E Web Wakeup – 1.8.0.97
1E Enterprise View – 2.0.100.81
1E AppClarity
1E Shopping – 4.0.0.1702
1E Nomad Branch– 4.0.100.436
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012
Microsoft Server 2008 R2 SP1 VDI – With RemoteFX
Along with part of this upgrade I have also upgraded my LAB System with a nice modification:
I have added a single ATI Radeon HD 6950 – 1 GB Video Card. I required this because I was unable to test Remote FX with my onboard adapter. So far I am able to watch full HD quality Videos via my Windows 7 VDI guest. I will test with a full Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 deployment integrated with SCVMM and Hyper-V in the coming months.
Check out a couple pictures of this beast – BTW – I picked it up for $230.00 CDN.
My next upgrade was to get off my old SATA Drives and upgrade to a couple of Corsair 120GB SSD Drives for my VHD Storage and Host Partition.
This upgrade provides me with amazing performance and I was able to build the following LAB configuring using Hyper-V Differencing Disks in less than 4 Hours inclusive of installing the Base OS, Differencing Disks, Sysprepping the master VHD, Installing AD, Exchange, SQL, CM 2007 R3, etc.
I have always been a fan of Monster Servers for lab environments to mimic production scenarios. After going through this upgrade I am a changed man!!! I have better performance off these little SSD Drives than off my old EVA 4400 or my Dell Equallogic PS 5000 and 6000’s.
The total upgrade cost me less than 700.00 CDN for my home lab and I think this is a must for anyone that is serious about upgrading their certifications and just learning about products.
