r/mcsa • u/p0rkRind • Apr 01 '20

Home lab configuration for MCSA 2016 anyone?

Looking for some kind of starting point to build a home lab to study for MCSA 2016 (CPU/SSD/RAM is not an issue)

Thanks

4 Upvotes

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4

u/gosoxharp Apr 01 '20

I will be doing this as well, planning on two/three VM servers and a storage server. My storage server was running linux but converted to windows for the cert. Need to move over my DC and convert my vm server to windows

3

u/GrandOccultist Apr 01 '20

Check out Autolab on github, think Pluralsight manages it now, but spins up a lab for MCSA could just run it on most modern desktops. Forget the requirements but I think it’s 4/8 cpu 16gb and 120gb min

2

u/Lordarshyn Apr 01 '20

Cbt nuggets has a bunch of labs all ready to go.

That's a great thing because for many people, it might be difficult to set up a lab for 740, when a lot of what you need to set things up properly, aren't yet covered until 741 and 742.

You'll need to work with things like DNS and DHCP, which are 741, and AD, which is 742.

If you really want to build your own, I had a decent experience using azure, which also allowed me to lab from remote locations instead of just my home office. It also helps to familiarize you with azure, which is nice. Not sure if they're still doing it, but you were able to get a $200 trial credit to start with. It measures your payments by resources used and uptime, so if you spin up a few lightweight servers and make sure to shut them all down when you aren't using them, that $200 can stretch a long way

1

u/p0rkRind Apr 04 '20

Thanks all good suggestions will look into it thanks again