Bob Fox has written a great post on Setting Up a Virtual Lab with Hyper-V. You should read it if you’re considering using Microsoft Hyper-V to power your virtual labs.
When I build out my labs I generally have a purpose in mind for what I want to use it for. In my case I may have a bunch of individual labs sitting inactive. Some of the purposes for building out labs are to
Many more purposes (add yours here)
- Demonstrate a farm that has multiple servers which will simulate a normal true to life environment.
- Demonstrate authentication methods such as Kerberos which cannot be truly tested on one single server (AD, SQL, MOSS etc)
- Test failover using NLB within a farm. (Do it here and not in your production environment)
- Test solution deployments
Test Service Packs and Security rollups.
If you are looking to use Hyper-V in your virtual labs, you should consider leveraging a solution like VMLogix LabManager to manage the lab as well. In addition, you might find the following posts relevant as you research your virtual lab requirements further:
- What Virtual Lab Automation Offers Over and Above a Hypervisor
- Features and Functionality in Virtual Lab Automation Solutions
- Management tools available for Hyper-V
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