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.
