Introducing the Microsoft Home Lab Series
The Inspiration Behind the Project
I am excited to announce a new blog series that will focus on building a Microsoft Home Lab environment. Some time ago, I was searching for the best guidelines for setting up a Microsoft testing environment without additional hardware, but I couldn’t find any. I found some concepts for complex labs that focused more on the networking side. So, I decided to build my test environment and share it with the public.
The Goal of the Project
In this new series of articles, we will learn how to create a Microsoft test environment to try solutions offered by Microsoft. The series will consist of several parts that will be interconnected. The idea of this project is to create a home lab on a personal computer without additional hardware such as physical servers, switches, etc. All the deployments that I will show will be deployed on my personal computer.
The goal of this project is to demonstrate how to create a Microsoft environment for people who are interested, thus allowing them to test without incurring unnecessary costs easily.
I decided to set up a hybrid environment because I deal with clients who still have most of their resources in hybrid mode. So, I wanted to cover both worlds, cloud and on-premise. It is also beneficial to have an environment where you can test on-prem things and cloud-only. However, I would prefer in the future for companies to move completely to the cloud, because only then can they fully take advantage of all the functions that the cloud offers, plus easier maintenance and configuration.
What’s Next?
In the next article, I will present the architecture of this project. We will walk through the individual parts that will be covered by the environment. The required hardware components and all the stuff you need for building that lab will be shown.
The project will cover all the knowledge, which I have acquired while working with Microsoft technologies. The test environment will be created in a way that I currently think will suit most people and allow them to do different tests.
The key components for creating a Microsoft Home Lab include:
- Microsoft Azure subscription
- Microsoft 365 Tenant
- Hyper-V Manager
While it’s challenging to cover every single step in building the environment, I will focus on the crucial aspects and provide detailed walkthroughs for those.
For more information and resources, please visit my GitHub repository: aljazperovsek/Microsoft-Home-Lab: Microsoft Home Lab Documentation (github.com)
Stay tuned for the next post where we will start tackling this exciting project!