With the Cloud at our disposal and a myriad of virtual Labs available, setting up a lab in this day and age is like reinventing the wheel. (MSDN membership, AWS free credits, additional offers) Both Azure and AWS provide free credits up to the tune of $150/mo or $100/mo to test their products, but sometimes your desire to build from the ground up takes over and you plunge in without a second thought.
Setup: Two Domain with two servers in each domain
My desire to do this was to achieve following tasks.
- one domain being windows only and other domain Being Rhel/Ubuntu with Windows as Domain controller
- Integrate Linux server into a Windows Domain
- Test Always on Failover between multi subnet or different Domains
or between Linux and Windows - Log Shipping, Mirroring , Replication between Windows and Linux
I know these are quite a few tasks to do but with tools like VirtualBox and Hyper-v and increasing configuration in personal systems it has become relatively easy to have this setup.
My Laptops configuration to do this are
OS: Windows 10 Pro (Hyper-V is supported only on Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise)
RAM : 32 GB DDR4 RAM
Storage: 1 TB HDD and 128 GB SSD,
Processor: Intel i7 -7700 HQ @2800 MHz with 4 Cores.
Virtualization S/W: Hyper-V
Software’s or Tools used:
PowerShell to Run AutomatedLab : This helps in building lab fast without the need of manual intervention.
Windows Server 2016 evaluation Edition
SQL Server 2017 Developer Edition for Windows Server
Red Hat Linux Server edition try for 30 days
SQL Server Management Studio v17.x
SQL Server Operations Studio for Installing on Linux server’s
I have tried using hyper-v and virtual box but in my experience when I try this with virtual box my system slows down and doing even mundane tasks is a pain, with Hyper-V it was smooth sailing all the way.
I know I have a lot to achieve so to make it more readable and not be overwhelming I will make this into short blog posts
Saurabh Srivastava's SQL Server Blog 
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