It’s no surprise; Cloud computing has firmly found its place in most organisations to date. Those that were reluctant to move to cloud and held back for as long as they could have now caved in and taken a bite of the apple – and they liked it. And those that invested in the early…
Why do organisations move to the cloud? Cloud platforms can provide greater flexibility and control over your environments. They also allow organisations to build and deploy faster than when compared with traditional on premise platforms by making use of Infrastructure as Code and other environment delivery mechanisms. Allowing the organisation to shift their focus to…
As part of my home lab, I decided to deploy MS SQL Server 2012 SP2 to host all of my databases where required for certain software (SCCM, SCORCH, etc). Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I found the following blog post which details the installation steps for you and thought I’d share it. Installing SQL Server…
Now that we have completed the AD pre-reqs, we can now look to deploy our new Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller. Deploy the base OS (Server 2012 R2) to the target device, be it physical or virtual. Carry out the standard configuration items for domain controllers (Static IP, Hostname, Updates, RDP, etc). Once complete, open…
This is the first part of 2 posts for migrating Active Directory from 2008 to 2012. This post will cover the per-requisites required to migrate AD. It is important to note, that once the schema version has been upgraded, it will not be possible to deploy a domain controller below the new functional level. I.E…
Recently I had a failed Exchange server which I could not be bothered to recover 🙂 When installing Exchange Server, multiple AD system objects and containers are created. When creating new users, it will look to use the Exchange policies previously defined (and stored in AD) to add the required SMTP address attribute to user…
The 4TB disks have now arrived and its time to get to work. As you may or may not know, the N40L has 4 slot bays for SATA disks and one 5.25″ bay empty for CD ROM Drives. I have decided to install a 200GB disk in the empty 5.25″ bay to fully utilise the…
Rather than spending money, I decided to re-purpose my HP Proliant Microserver N40L boxes that I previously had FreeNAS deployed to for ISCSI storage for my ESXi Nodes. As one server is currently not presenting any disks, I decided to build 2012 R2 directly on to it and found that after the initial build, it…
As this is just a home lab, I do not require a full enterprise solution for networking. No fancy switches needed here (although I do own multiple Cisco bits and pieces but these wont be implemented). I have decided that I want to break the network down into the following VLANs. LAN/Management (192.168.1.x /24) Storage…
So the time has come to rebuild my lab which currently consists of a number of VMware ESXi nodes and a shed load of VMs. For the sake of this rebuild, all VMs will be trashed and will not be required (secondary DCs, Exchange, testing servers, files servers). I wont be going into deployment of…