What's New

My Lab Setup

So I decided to build my lab environment over the weekend with a low budget of $0 dollars. This is hard to do but, I was able to get by with it. I had a good laptop from Dell which is the Precision M6500 aka the Orange Beast!

Laptop specs:

  • Graphic Card: NVIDIA Quardro FX 3800M Graphics with 1GB dedicated memory
  • Processor: Intel Quad Core i7 Processor Extreme Edition
  • Memory: 8GB of fast 1333 MHz DDR3 memory – which I could go up to 32GB “I wish”
  • Operating System: Windows 7 Enterprise x64

Software:

  • Camtasia Studio [screen recording software]
  • Snagit [great software to capture the screen and save it as a jpeg or png file]
  • VMware Workstation 8 [application to host my VMs]

Once I got all my software installed and configured I started to create my virtual machines. My first virtual machine that I build in VMware Workstation 8 was my Active Directory server. I used Windows Server 2008 R2 enterprise edition.

AD Server VM specs:

  • 1 GB Memory
  • 1 CPU
  • 40GBs of Hard Drive
  • NAT setting for the network

My second virtual machine was my Microsoft SQL 2008 server.

SQL Server VM specs:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
  • 1 GB Memory
  • 1 CPU
  • 40 GBs of Hard Drive
  • NAT setting for the network

My third and fourth virtual machine was testing and installing software such as Microsoft System Virtual Machine Manger, App-v, and Hyper-v.

Third & Fourth VM specs:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
  • 1GB Memory each
  • 1 CPU each
  • 40 GBs of Hard Drive each
  • NAT setting for the network

My last virtual machine is Windows 7 which was upgraded to Windows 8, but I took a snapshot of it so I could I go back to Windows 7 :).

Specs on that machine are:

  • 1GB Memory
  • 1 CPU
  • 40GBs of Hard Drive
  • NAT setting for the network

The reason for the memory and the CPU is that this is only for testing only. I don’t really need a hardcore VM to do this stuff if I’m only testing it out 🙂 and I don’t want to overkill the Precision Laptop; this bad boy gets really hot.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

About BjTechNews (1046 Articles)
An IT guy trying to learn everything about technology and sharing it with you all. I'm a blogger and video blogger who highlights daily news in the tech industry, promoting tips and hacks for fellow techies.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: