Building a LAB on Windows Server 2012 - Part 1

Introduction
With a limited budget and a high curiosity on the technology, have ever you wonder how you can achieve that?Since the Windows Server 2012 was released, there is a lot of people are looking forward on performing a testing over the software feature, but to create a test lab, it might be difficult if you only have a single PC. On this articles, I will share how you can built your own lab for the storage testing purpose. I have also draw a diagram for you on how it should look like and what are the component that you required.


Configuration
Let's get started and get familiar with the diagram 1

Diagram 1 : An overview of the component of the lab

The entire lab, was been built in a single PC with the following requirement
a)Host Operating system : Windows Server 2012
b)Hypervisor : Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
c)Memory : 16 GB
d)Processor : Intel i5
e)Storage : Sata 1TB
f)Network card : Intel

The objective of the lab, you will learn on how to configure the following
a)Hyper-V & networking
b)Active Directory
c)iSCSI server
d)Clustering
e)Scale out file server with full redundancy

Other info

• Building a lab in Windows Server 2012 Part 1
• Configure the hyper-v host as preparing for the lab - Part 2
• Configure Active Directory on the VM - Part 3
• Configure the iSCSI storage - Part 4
• Install cluster on the file server as preparation for lab - Part 5
• How to validate cluster configuration - Part 6
• Configure cluster on the lab - Part 7
• Performing cleanup on the clustering networking - Part 8
• Preparing scale out file server - Part 9
• Configure file share and perform a test - Part 10

Summary

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