One of the world’s largest business solutions provider (through their broad portfolio of document technology, services, software and supplies) needed a robust server environment for simulating multiple scenarios their own analysts may encounter through the use of their latest document management software solution while consulting with their end users, naturally they turned to Hire Intelligence for a solution.
In order to train the analysts to be able to recommend, implement and then provide ongoing support for the right combination of products, the need arose to simulate multiple differing enterprise physical and virtual hardware environments.
A wish list for a suitable training lab was produced with a request to supply for a 2 week training period. The requirement called for 16 servers running Microsoft 2012 R2, 9 x Physical and 7 x Virtual. Also required was all licensing and pre configuration for Active Directory, Hyper-V services, Exchange Server, Sharepoint Server and 7 x SQL Instances.
Hewlett Packard Proliant servers were supplied for the physical hardware. Intel Xeon based 8 Core DL360 G8’s for the training servers and a 48 Core AMD Opteron based DL585 G7 for the Hyper-V (Virtual) host. Each of the training machines was loaded with 2012 Server, Standard Edition for the training machines and Datacenter Edition for the Hyper-V host. A virtual network was configured within Hyper-V then bridged to the physical LAN. Seven virtual machines were built and also loaded with 2012 Server Standard Edition. From there, one physical machine was configured to host the Active Directory service, Exchange Server and Sharepoint Server as well as to provide DHCP and DNS services to all machines in the training lab. All machines were joined to the domain and one machine was configured to provide the required SQL instances.
From there the lab was ready for deployment, and the training equipment delivered and installed at the client’s training site so the training staff could finalise preparation of the lab.
