Lab-Alpha Environment Setup

This is a pretty simple environment setup that I will be using to deploy and test various Microsoft Services. There will be three (3) virtual machines (VMs) deployed on VMware Workstation Pro 15. This entire enviroment resides on my personal use laptop which is a Lenovo Yoga 900-13SK Signature Edition. It boast a quadcore processor with 16 GB of RAM. She sounds much fancier than she really is at four (4) years old.

The first step aside from the obvious powering on of your work space and opening the VMware Workstation Pro application on said work space, is to deploy the network that the VMs will communicate over. At this stage, it is also a good idea to ensure that the prerequisite configuration has been applied to your work space to support Virtualization Technology. Lacking this setting within your host system BIOS will prevent you from being able to power on VMs after they are created.

Step 1: Create the Virtual Network

Create the virtual network within VMware workstation that allow the VMs to communicate. They only need to communicate between themselves over the 192.168.1.0/24 network. Here is a walk-through showing one way this network can be created.

Step 2: Deploy the Virtual Machines

Now that the networking is in place it is time to deploy our VMs. Ensure that you have downloaded an ISO of Windows Server 2016 since that is the operating system we will be using for this lab. The three (3) VMs deployed within the Alpha-Lab will have the attributes containted in Table 2.1.

The deployment of these VMs will be vanilla meaning basic with little to no change. The only notable change is that I deploy an additional drive onto these VMs as a place for the server application to be stored. Here is a walk-through showing one way these VMs can be deployed. Ensure that you provision all three (3) of the VMs from the list above before moving on to the next step.

Step 3: Configure the VMs and Guest OSes

The previous step had us provision three (3) VMs but the VMs are not fully configured. They still need to have the second hard drive added, IP address and Host name assigned, VMware tools installed, etc. Take the Domain Controller (TestDC01) through Steps 3 and 4 before configuring the remaining servers since they will need to be added to the domain as a final step. Here is a walk-through showing one way to configure these various items within the VMs. Be sure to refer back to the Table in the previous step.

Step 4: Deploy the Active Directory Forest

Active Directory is the core of everything windows so it is an obvious choice to be the first server service to be deployed within this lab. Here is a walk-through of one way to create a new AD forest.