Microsoft Homelab

I have begun building a dungeon homelab around Microsoft Infrastructure; PDC/DHCP/DNS , IIS is installed but not in DMZ yet., pfsense as home router. Hosting the servers in Hyper-V. Tonight I am installling Exchange, then S4B, Service Center, SharePoint, SQL Server

Is there a forum for Microsoft Home Labbers. Plenty of good materials on the internet obviously but have never looked for a forum/community. Any suggestions other than run linux? (That will probably run on an esxi server next but work is microsoft and I have licenses).

thanks,
t

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Lots of stuff you can do:

Setup AD failover, and separate DHCP failover. Setup RDS servers and RemoteApp servers, there are a ton of software out there that are compatible with this.

MS SQL Server is a good one, once you learn basic administration look into performance tuning. Now do all of the above in PowerShell :grin:

Checkout PowerShell DSC, Octopus, SCCM, and other Config Management. Get a free Azure account (sign up with the developer program and you get like $100 credits every month I think?) and test services in Azure + on Prem for the true Hybrid Cloud experience lol.

Build fake users with PowerShell and CSV files. Build Hyper-V infrastructure in PowerShell, too.

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As for a homelab forum, I’ve heard good things about /r/homelab. At least their wiki seems to be a good resource.

Thanks… This weekend I will stand up vs for exchange and service center. Lots to be learned.

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Have fun! More important than learning the tools and software, I think, is learning the concepts and methods for keeping everything redundant and working.

My Use Case is a little different. I support software for Meetings in Corporate meeting rooms and regularly have to troubleshoot randomly configured corporate infrastructure and explain to them why their infrastructure isn’t letting them set up collaboration in their meeting rooms. It is interesting how creative organizations can be in configuring their environments.