So, I recently got an MSDN account through work for the purpose of me doing some testing at work as well as experimenting on my spare time at home to learn the ropes of server administration.
I’m pretty new to the world of network administration. My background is desktop tech support. So, how did I land a job as a System Administrator? Organizational re-org. Not complaining though as this is something I’ve always wanted to do but lacked the proper tools and work exposure to properly learn. I’m relishing this opportunity! Plus, I’m a very quick learner and my managers have noticed that too, hence the MSDN account and the chance to dive head-first into some pretty big projects.
So, where was I going with this? Ah yes! I decided to start putting that MSDN account to good use right away this weekend by setting up my own personal testing and learning network using Hyper-V on my aging, but still pretty beefy, primary PC. The old rig has a first gen Core-i7 920 CPU and 24Gb of ram, which should be more than enough to spin a few VMs.
First order of business was setting up Hyper-V. Luckily, my PC’s old Windows 7 Professional OS installation got upgraded to Windows 10 Pro. What’s so interesting about Windows 10 Pro in this context? It has Hyper-V build-in, which the home version does not. You just need to go to the Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows Features On/Off -> and then enable Hyper-V.
I won’t dive into the details of setting up a virtual machine in Hyper-V just yet. If anybody wants to know, ask and then maybe I’ll post about it! Same goes for the configuration steps of the various server services. If I get requests, then I’ll make a post with links to screenshots.
So Sunday I started with my first server. I chose Windows Server 2012 R2 as the basis of it because it is the Server OS that my employer is moving forward with in the future. Figured I may as well learn about it. I gave it 40Gb of HDD space, 2gb of startup ram and an Internal NIC. Once the OS was installed, I renamed the machine to reflect it’s role (for my own ease of tracking) and then configured it as the DC for a new domain.
Next step was a virtual PC, to test my domain. Same hardware config as the server but with Windows 10 enterprise as the OS. Once it was all setup, I tried adding it to the domain. But, no dice. What could it be? A bit of research and some logic made me realize that the virtual NICs do not have a DNS server so they don’t assign one via DHCP. I set both the PC and the Server to static IPs within the same sub-net and pointed my virtual PC to my Domain Controller as it’s primary DNS server. This solved the issue and I was able to add the system to the domain!
Next step was setting up an exchange server, because setting up my own email server sounds cool. Stuck again with Server 2012 R2 as the OS and got the Exchange Install ISO from MSDN and loaded it in the VM. So, before getting started with the install, I made a few clumsy searches on google for setup instructions. Remember, I’m new to this and I am purposefully getting in way over my head. I might look like an idiot but I’m trying to learn. Found out there are a ton of prerequisites before getting started and made sure these were all satisfied. Once that was done, I launched the installer and setup the Mailbox Role.
Once the install was complete, the server rebooted and I launched the exchange web app which is a web-based administration portal (One of the prerequisites is that you install IIS). It, however, didn’t work. Dug around for more information and then realized that I’m an idiot: I had to install the Client access role as well. With that done, the EWA worked properly and I was able to setup the basic server config and create a few test mailboxes for some network users I had setup on the DC.
Tester internal delivery which ended up working perfectly. However, try as I might, I never got external delivery to work. I even recruited the help of one of my buddies who’s a networking and DNS expert and he couldn’t crack that nut for me via text support. I’ll have to get him to come see my setup directly. I tried setting up port forwarding on my router to the DC with the DC given an external NIC to ensure communication to the outside world. But no luck. Oh well, at least internal emails work!
Notes: You honestly don’t need to setup more than one virtual CPU core per VM. They just aren’t that CPU intensive, especially not in a small-scale test environment. However, whatever server you decide to use as an Exchange server, I suggest you make it a dedicated exchange server with no other primary services. Exchange is extremely memory intensive. When you create a Hyper-V VM, it only asks you to set the STARTUP memory limit, this determines how much ram the VM uses on startup and the maximum if things don’t get too crazy. However, by default it has Dynamic memory usage which means it can actually use up MORE than the startup limit if the VM is being pushed hard, as was the case with my Exchange server yesterday eating up 11Gb of ram! Heck, right now it’s idling at 7.5Gb of ram used. If you’re going to setup an exchange server, make sure your host system is very beefy ram wise.
Kinda wish I had a commercial grade rack-mount server with over 50gb of ram. Sigh.
My next order of business? A secondary DC and a WSUS server.
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