Systems administration has been part of my job for the last 20 years or more, and has been a full-time job title for almost the last 3 years. I’ve got a couple of ongoing IT projects that require some basic infrastructure, and also need to be isolated from my home environment. Last fall, I was gifted a Dell PowerEdge R815 with 128 GB RAM from Luke Prince via coworker/amigo/windmill-adversary Jeremy Ey, and I have access to VMware and Microsoft products through the university.
So after getting ESXi and vCenter up and running on the server, it’s time to document setting up some isolated labs that can simulate a Windows and Active Directory environment, and then proceed from there to my actual projects.