This is part of my series on building a virtual lab for use with SQL Server and Windows. You can see the entire series here: Building a Virtual Lab with Hyper-V.

The whole point of virtualization is better use of resources. Whether it’s CPU, storage, networking, power, etc., we are trying to save having to purchase 5 or 6 machines and connect them all, pay for them, etc. It’s much, much easier to use virtualization.

This is especially true of storage. When we build a lab, we don’t want to have to allocate a ton of space for our systems. In my case, for my design, this is what I want to end up with.

From my last post, I had the bottom two files already set up. These are my installations of Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard and Core, sysprep’d and ready to use.

Differencing – Saving Space

The idea in differencing disks is similar to the snapshot feature I used in VMWare to do this same process. I take a base disk, and create a “copy” of it. Except the copy doesn’t have everything from the base disk. Like a database snapshot in SQL Server, if I need to read something that’s in the base disk, I reference that. If I change something, or add something, I read from the copy.

As you can see above, I have 5 small disks at 4MB and my 2 large base disks. Each of the small disks is a differencing disk off either the Standard or Core base installations.

I created these by selecting New Hard Disk in Hyper-V Manager

After the intro screen, I make sure I’ve picked VHDX.

At the next screen, I choose the differencing option.

Now I need to pick a location for the copy. On my setup, I’m trying to keep this lab contained, so I have a WS2K12 Lab folder. I choose that as my location for the differencing disk. I give it a name, in my case, I’m using “Function” concatenated with the name of the Windows host. As seen below, my file server will be named “FileAvalanche.vhdx”.

Next I choose the parent disk. this is the base image. Depending on what I had in my design, I choose the Standard or Core images for various machines.

I get a summary where I can see all my options, and then click finish.

I do this five times and all of a sudden I have a lab.

A few things. Use some naming convention so you can tell which disk is which. Also, make sure you stick things in a location. I set a specific folder location for my VMs and disks, and then altered the Hyper-V Manager settings to default to this folder. On my machine that’s D:\Virtual Machines.

That helps me keep things contained, and it also means that when I want to copy a VM for a backup or to another machine, it’s easy.

I needed to get this one on Hyper-V, so I decided to document the process. I’ve put together a series that looks at the steps I took.

• Virtual Lab – Design and Setup
• Differencing Disks
• Setting up a new VM
• Adapter Setup
• The Domain
• New Domain User
• SQL Server

This will fill in as I go through the process, so if there’s something you don’t see, it’s coming.

This is part of a series where I set up a virtual lab for testing and misc work. The other parts in the series are here: Building a Virtual Lab with Hyper-V.

I haven’t had a good lab set up since I moved from VMWare to Hyper-V on my systems. Since then I’ve had a number of random VMs set up, but none connected in any meaningful way as a domain. They were all standalones, but that needs to change.

I wanted to do some additional testing with a few Windows and SQL features that needed a domain. So I decided to set one up with Hyper-V.

I googled around and found a few references:

• MCSA 70-462 Training Kit Preparation: Hyper-V Lab Environment
• Creating a 2 Node SQL Server 2008 Virtual Cluster Part 1
• SQL Server Virtual Lab
• Hosting the Windows Server 2012 Base Configuration Test Lab with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

I decided to try to do some of this myself, using these as guides, but also incorporating some of my new Powershell knowledge along the way. I won’t claim this is the best way to build a virtual lab, but this is the way I did it by cobbling together various piece of information.

With that in mind, here’s what I’m looking to do. I want to create a domain with a few servers and a client for testing. I plan on making this setup on a separate network, using the 10.10.10.x address space as I don’t expect to run into networks with that one at home, or work.

The machines I’m looking for are as follows. The role, OS, and then names are listed below:

• DC (WS2K12 R2 Core) – DenverDC
• SQL Server instances (WS2K12 R2 Core and Standard) – Broncos, Nuggets, and Rockies
• File Server (WS2K12 R2 Standard) – Avalanche
• Client (Win 8) – Keystone

I’ll be running through the process and trying to document this for myself, and others.

First Steps

The first steps here are easy. I have Hyper-V setup, but if you don’t, it’s an easy confg item you can see at the beginning of this article.

Next, download software. I didn’t have Windows Server on this machine, so I accessed MSDN and downloaded Windows Server 2012 R2. I have an MSDN license, so I get a few licenses. As this was downloading, I made not of the product keys.

I’ve had a space on my machine setup. Since I used to use VMWare and Hyper-V, I have a space on my spare drive where I separate Hyper-V and VMWare. Inside the Hyper-V folder are my VMs for quick copying to my external drives and laptop as backups. In this case, I’m setting up a “WS2K12 Lab” folder.

The Parent

This is a standard setup I’ve seen in all the tutorials. Create a VM, create a new hard disk (I used defaults), install Windows Server, and run “sysprep” on the VM. I did this with both Core and Standard Server. This gave me two hard disks that had images of the server systems on them.

I first set these disks to “read only” and then deleted the parent VMs. This gets me the base systems on which I will build things. I’ll deal with the Win 8 client later.

That’s all I’m talking about here. I’ll move into the rest of the steps in future posts.