Test Lab Guide: Deploy the base configuration

Updated: August 10, 2012

Applies To: Windows Server 2012

Test Lab Guides (TLGs) allow you to get hands-on experience with new products and technologies using a pre-defined and tested methodology that results in a working configuration. When you use a TLG to create a test lab, instructions tell you what servers to create, how to configure the operating systems and platform services, and how to install and configure any additional products or technologies. A TLG experience enables you to see all of the components and the configuration steps on both the front-end and back-end that go into a single- or multi-product or technology solution.

A challenge in creating useful TLGs is to enable their reusability and extensibility. Because creating a test lab can represent a significant investment of time and resources, your ability to reuse and extend the work required to create test labs is important. An ideal test lab environment would enable you to create a basic lab configuration, save that configuration, and then build out multiple test labs in the future by starting with that basic configuration.

The purpose of this TLG is to enable you to create the Windows Server® 2012 Base Configuration test lab, upon which you can build a test lab based on other Windows Server 2012-based TLGs from Microsoft, TLG extensions in the TechNet Wiki, or a test lab of your own design that can include Microsoft or non-Microsoft products.

Depending on how you deploy your test lab environment, you can image the drives for the Windows Server 2012 Base Configuration test lab if you are using physical computers or you can create snapshots of the Base Configuration test lab virtual machines. This enables you to easily return to baseline configuration where most of the routine client, server, and networking services have already been configured so that you can focus on building out a test lab for the products or technologies of interest. For this reason, make sure that you perform a disk image on each computer if you’re using physical computers, or perform virtual machine snapshots if you are using virtual machines after completing all the steps in this TLG.

The Windows Server 2012 Base Configuration TLG is just the beginning of the test lab experience. Other Windows Server 2012-based TLGs or TLG extensions in the TechNet Wiki focus on Microsoft products or platform technologies, but all of them use this Windows Server 2012Base Configuration TLG as a starting point.

About this guide

This document contains instructions for setting up the Windows Server 2012Base Configuration test lab by deploying four server computers running Windows Server 2012 and one client computer running Windows® 8. The resulting configuration simulates a private intranet and the Internet.

Important

The following instructions are for configuring the Windows Server 2012 Base Configuration test lab. Individual computers are needed to separate the services provided on the network and to clearly show the desired functionality. This configuration is neither designed to reflect best practices nor does it reflect a desired or recommended configuration for a production network. The configuration, including IP addresses and all other configuration parameters, is designed only to work on a separate test lab network.

Note

If you are able to work from a computer-based copy of this document during the lab exercises, and you are running virtual machines in Hyper-V, leverage the Hyper-V clipboard integration feature to paste commands. This will minimize potential errors with mistyped command strings.

  1. Highlight and right-click a command from this document listed in bold text

  2. Click Copy.

  3. From the virtual machine menu bar, click Clipboard, and then click Type clipboard text.