Rebuilding the Test Lab v2

Last year I wrote an article for Powershell.org extolling the benefits of a home lab and how it didn’t cost much to build a basic one. You can read it here.

That lab has done me well, but things change and needs increase and opportunities arise. The needs changing obviously is ” I want to be able to run more VM’s without sitting and listening to my disk thrash for minutes to start one”.  The answer to that need is “buy more RAM or a SSD”, both of which have that nasty side-effect of costing money.  So I gritted my teeth and waited…

Fast forward and now my work is decommissioning physical servers due to them not being covered under a 4 hour service agreement. Also due to a ton of virtualization by yours truly. So there are a few functioning servers with older cpu’s and smaller disks sitting idle…. yeah right. Time for TestLab v2!

This time I’m doing things a little different. First of all, obviously I’m not building on a Windows 8/10 machine. Secondly this box, while small by server standards, is a big improvement over my home pc. Also I’m building this as a test lab for our team so it’s a little more ” official”.  I am using their hardware and network after all, I should share *grin*!

Now I’ve recognized a flaw in my process of “build, test, document”. Really it’s a side-effect of my mild ADD and the hectic work pace I keep up. Once I’ve built it and solved those problems and tested it and solved those problems, I kind of lose interest.  There’s no more puzzle to solve, just homework to do. bah.

So we’re going to try a NEW (to me) technique.  I’m going to write AS I build it, typing during those install waits, and reboots. I’m going to break this into a few parts.  First this introduction, followed by  a section on “Pre-build planning”,one on the actual build, then a wrapup “post-mortem” post.

. Let’s see how this goes!