Daryl Hunter – Hubby, Daddy, Mentor, Friend

So, this past week I was in sunny Phoenix at the Spring 2013 National Church IT Roundtable.  Each year, a few hundred of my friends get together to talk about Friendship, Food (lots of food), Faith, and Technology.

I had the privilege – again – to team up with my pal @wantmoore and teach a 6-hour (over 2 days) dive into building Highly Available Infrastructure.  I think half of our audience fell asleep.  The others were just waiting for me to say something stupid – which I did – a lot.

One of the coolest things we are doing at the Roundtables now are "TEN Talks" – modeled after the TED talks.  We talk for up to 10 minutes (with a buzzer and Jaws music if we go over) on a useful technical topic.  This year I spoke about my Mobile Sandbox.

One of my co-workers is the origin of this particular "type" of setup – I took his setup, modified a few things, and now use it as my own.

First of all – here's what my mobile lab looks like in Visio

 

I use VMware Workstation 9 as my "lab ecosystem of choice" right now.  But, as a technologist – I will probably change tomorrow.

There are lots of good ways to build a mobile Sandbox. You could use VMware Workstation, or Fusion, or Virtual Box, or you could use your company gear (ha ha – just kidding) (not really) – but I highly recommend you build one.

I'm asked a lot how I learn things.  I am an avid reader. I read books and blogs and tweets and cereal boxes.  But the main thing I do is practice.  I learned guitar and piano that way.  I learned backgammon and chess that way.  And I fully believe that without a proper sandbox, I couldn't learn the various technical software packages that I use daily.

Here's a snapshot of what VMs make up my lab today.

How I did it was build a Windows 8, Windows Server 2008R2 and a Windows 2012 Baseline image and then Sysprepped it.  You can see the "Sysprep" images above.

Then, I created "linked clones" of those to make my various virtual machines. This is similar to using "differencing disks" – making a "master" disk and then each individual child disk/machine only holds the changes.  It saves on hard drive space – which is a premium on my laptop.

The Virtual Networking editor in VMware Workstation is pretty nice.  If you recall from my Visio, I have lots of Networks.  You can see them all here.

You'll also notice that I have iSCSI networks – presenting storage to my lab vSphere & Hyper-V hosts.  How I did that was by adding additional disks (using my 2nd hard drive) to my VCENTER01 virtual machine:

Then I used the iSCSI Target for Server 2008 R2.  For Server 2012 it's built in; however, for Server 2008 R2 you can download that here.

And like a good engineer – I present out 2x different iSCSI networks for MPIO

Here's how I give appropriate disks to Hyper-V for the Cluster Witness/Quorum and CSV

And here's the various disks I present to vSphere for my Datastore use

From the Visio, you can see I built a SQL2008R2 box, and VCENTER01 attaches there.  Because of how my Virtual Networking was done, I had access to my VMs from my normal Desktop but I adjusted my hosts file to make it easy to use the FQDN of my "lab.darylhunter.me' domain machines.  I could fire up vSphere Client…

And verify MPIO for my Datastores

and

Finally, my lab sometimes needed Internet access.  And since I isolated my various networks, I needed some sort of a router.  So I built a simple RRAS/2008R2 router.  I could have used lots of products, but instead, I used Server 2008R2 with 2x Virtual NICS and bridged one of them.

Anyway, those are just some highlights of how I did it.  You're smart, I'm sure you could do better.

How do YOU Sandbox?  What do you use?  Something similar?