PDF Build Your Own Windows Server IT Lab eBook1 Alarson Adeleke

Table of Content

• The best applicant tracking systems for 2022
• What’s a home lab?
• There’s no shame in consumer hardware 🔗︎
• How to build a Windows Server 2022 home lab and why
• Software

The most damning evidence is Proxmox’s graph of my CPU usage over time. In the past few months, I’ve never pushed CPU load above 11%, so I’m crazy overprovisioned. This was the first time I’d ever built a dual-CPU computer.

I wanted to do this because I work a lot of Proofs of Concept with end clients and there is always some odd-ball configuration or issue that arises during these POCs. I found that without a lab to work from some of these questions don’t get appropriately answered. The first lab I built to do this tutorial was for a Windows Machine and then I got my hands on a Mac to build out the lab. Windows has the capability to do some of this through MS PowerShell but I found it to be a bit more cumbersome to use and the other tools I used don’t really work easily with Windows or OS X. Video games can benefit companies by giving employees a recreational outlet to build cooperation and morale.

The best applicant tracking systems for 2022

Deploying ESXi VMs on different disk drives increases performance. 500GB SATA III 6Gb/s SSD used for active VMs (the VMs I normally have running, like a Domain Controller, Exchange servers, Skype/Lync servers, etc.). Enabling Windows Server 2012 R2 disk deduplication provides even more storage capacity! Delivers up to 98K IOPS 4KB random read / 90K IOPS 4KB random write speed. If you're building with 128GB RAM you might consider upgrading to the 1TB Samsung drive.

Install Windows on the server like it would on a physical machine. We simply need to generate an IP address for the box in this manner. Because the procedure for configuring the IP address for the virtual switches is identical to how we configured it, I do not include shcreenshots here. To test connectivity, go to either VM01 or VM02. Having a virtual console gives me the freedom to fail and makes me more open to experimenting with different operating systems.

What’s a home lab?

It’s always going to be a substantial effort to install and learn a new OS, but knowing that I don’t have to drag machines back and forth makes me much more open to it. Had I not built TinyPilot, I might have stuck with ESXi as “good enough” rather than taking a chance on Proxmox. If you read the above and thought, “Kimchi is just software. Why did Michael have to build a whole new server just to install a different VM manager?

At the time of my first build, most of my development work was on backend Python and Go applications, and they didn’t perform significant disk I/O. Since then, I’ve expanded into frontend web development. Modern web frameworks all use Node.js, so every project has anywhere from 10k-200k random JavaScript files in its dependency tree.

There’s no shame in consumer hardware 🔗︎

Now, there are laptops and fanless PCs that can efficiently run many virtual machines. Go for a big case if you have many legacy hard drives you need to use, but if you have a choice of storage, then a big case is not a stringent requirement for building a home lab. If you don’t have a DNS server, you may edit the hosts file on your VM running vCenter and on a physical machine on which VMware Workstation is installed.

In this case, you can deploy a VMware home lab on one of the existing computers without erasing any data. This blog post explains how to create a vSphere 7 home lab by using your existing hardware with VMware Workstation installed. My home lab server is a custom-built machine designed to balance performance with low noise and power consumption. It provides 26TB of network storage, and runs a variety of virtual machines and docker containers that let me experiment with new technologies and provide the tools for my home automation hobby.

Each server utilizes SATA III 6Gb/s drives and USB 3.0 ports for fast I/O performance. Think of a home lab as the technology equivalent of the scientist’s laboratory. It’s a place where you can experiment with new technologies, attempt to interconnect various services in novel ways and quickly clean things up when you’re done. While you might be picturing a huge rack of howling servers, fortunately for us you can now create the equivalent of a small data center on a single piece of physical equipment. Before completing the setup wizard, you’ll be required to check a box acknowledging that installing WHS will wipe out the all data on the hard drive. Needless to say, be absolutely certain there’s nothing important on the system before proceeding.

With my VMs running on top of Synology’s storage, I had to shut down my entire VM fleet before applying any update from Synology. It was the same reboot problem I had when I ran VMs on my Windows desktop. Choosing the best PC to build a virtual machine lab is important if you plan to use it for software testing or development. It depends on what you’re going to be using the virtual machine for. For example, if you’re going to need a lot of processing power and a large memory capacity, then it’s best to have at least one quad-core processor and 12 GB of RAM.

A dedicated computer lab is no longer a viable option to provide a practical solution with three-year University leased computers. The challenge in providing a long-term solution heavily relies on the individual academic staffs who deliver such courses. There is an urgent need to find a new long-term working solution for this problem. After numerous search and research in finding an optimal solution, a portable computer lab using virtualisation is proposed. Instead of using a desktop computer in a common lab, each student enrolled in the course such as Microsoft Active Directory is allocated a customised USB hard dive. This paper aims to share the knowledge as well as tricks and tips gained through the process and to provide step by step instructions for building the customised USB hard dive.

Microsoft announced on September 1st, 2021, that Windows Server 2022 will be available on that date. This server is better than the previous one because it supports shielded virtual machines for Linux, a version of the VM configuration updated to version 9.x, and hibernation support. Furthermore, ReFS is now able to deduplicate data. Windows Server 2022 runs nested virtualization on AMD processors as part of its Server 2022 feature set. The UI of Hyper-V manager is the same as it was previously.

But the 550 W version was only $10 more, which seemed like a fair price for an extra 100 W of breathing room. I typically allocate 40 GB of space to each VM, so 1 TB would give me plenty of room. If I need to upgrade later, I can always buy more disks. The downside of a dual-CPU system was that it limited my options for motherboards. Only a handful of motherboards support dual Intel 2011-v3 CPUs. Their prices ranged from $300 to $850, which was far more than I expected to spend on a motherboard.