My role at work demands that I be able to demo lots of different sorts of scenarios, e.g. SBS 2011 + SCE 2010, or Hyper-V + System Center, or … well, lots of stuff. All these scenarios are pretty much mutually exclusive in a single portable lab (my laptop, aka The Beast).
So my solution is as follows:
- Configure the laptop to boot from a Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD
- Enable AD and Hyper-V (not recommended in production)
- Configure a standard AD, policies, and Hyper-V setup
- Install drivers, patches, and so on
- Shut it down
- Copy the (boot from) VHD to a safe location
No I can quickly create a new lab on this Windows 7 laptop in a matter of minutes instead of hours:
- Boot up into Windows 7 (from C:)
- Copy the above VHD – this will either wipe/replace to configured VHD or I’ll save the original VHD lab
This gives me a new host and AD in the time it takes to copy a 10 GB VHD. That means I can deploy SCE 2010 in on lab (running on VHD A) or the full dynamic datacenter in another lab (VHD B), without the need to totally rebuild the entire host OS, and go through the time consuming process of installing drivers on a W2008 R2 laptop.