If you’re anything like me, you build up and tear down your lab on a regular basis. You might do this because you’re studying, you might want to try out new ways of doing things, or you might just want to flex your buid muscles while you’re in an operations period to keep your skills fresh. I run a local lab on my home desktop, and found myself tearing it down quite regularly, so I decided it was time to script, streamline and document the process as much as possible.

In this first entry of this series, we’ll do the groundwork for the Lab. We’ll install Hyper-V, create a template disk which can be “cloned” for future builds – all machines will use differencing disks so we can keep the footprint of our lab to an absolute minimum.

The first machine will be a Windows 2012 R2 Server Core install, which is as lean as you can get. We’ll also run a windows update from the comandline, and finally we’ll sysprep the machine in preparation for cloning.

In future entries in this series, we’ll make a child differencing disk and install Server GUI, which will then become the parent disk for any machines which require it, we’ll create an Active Directory, a Lync 2013 Enterprise pool, and maybe a few more goodies. Continue reading →