Mobile lab environment (Part 1)

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I wanted to test some of the new functionalities from Windows 2016 TP4 and SCVMM 2016 TP4. The blog post of Thomas Maurer (Link) got me thinking about reinstalling my laptop with the latest Windows 10 Pro Build that was available for our company (Build 10586) with nested Hyper-V. After the installation was finished I joined my laptop to Azure AD (johndejager.com) which was awesome with the Azure authenticator (see screenshot).

I enabled the Hyper-V role and got started with the networking part.

Networking

The most irritating thing for me, with creating lab environments was “how do i get internet” for updates etc. My solution was to create a server with two NIC’s and enable “routing and remote access”. But this was never a stable solution.

The new switchtype NAT was introduced in Windows 10 build 10586 brought a solution to me. I created a new VMSwitch by running the following commands:

New-VMSwitch -Name "NATSwitch" -SwitchType NAT -NATSubnetAddress 10.100.1.0/24

New-NetNat -Name VMSwitchNat -InternalIPInterfaceAddressPrefix "10.100.1.0/24"

After this commands I have set a static ip (10.100.1.1) to the new created NIC (vEthernet (NATSwitch)) on Windows 10.

Domain Controller

Now that the networking part is done I can create the first VM wich is a domain controller. Because this domain controller is going to be used a long time I did not want this to be a technical preview or some kind. So I installed this server with Windows 2012 R2. I promoted the server to domain controller and have set up DNS.

Hyper-V

Before I installed the Hyper-V Servers I created two new virtual machines (HPV01 & HPV02) and enabled this virtual machines for nested Hyper-V. This can be done by running the following command:

Invoke-WebRequest https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Microsoft/Virtualization-Documentation/master/hyperv-tools/Nested/Enable-NestedVm.ps1 -OutFile ~/Enable-NestedVm.ps1  ~/Enable-NestedVm.ps1 -VmName HPV01

This can also be done by meeting the following requirements:

The physical host must be at least Windows 10 build 10565 of Windows Server 2016 TP4;
The virtual machine must at least Windows 10 build 10565 of Windows Server 2016 TP4;
The virtual machine must have a minimum of 4 GB ram;
A processor with Intel VT-x (nested virtualization is available only for Intel processors at this time);
Dynamic Memory must be disabled on the virtual machine;
Enable Virtualization Extensions on the vCPU (Set–VMProcessor –VMName “HPV01” –ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true);
Enable MAC Address Spoofing.

After the virtual machines were set up I installed Windows 2016 TP4 Download here in the virtual machines. I joined them to the newly created domain and rebooted.

The next step is to create a server with VMM and cluster the two Hyper-V Servers. I will be posting that i a new blog part.

Mobile lab environment (Part 1)

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