How to Quickly Build a Basic Home Lab
Building a home lab, in my opinion, is one of the absolute best ways to learn. It allows you to actually practice what you’re studying and gives you the opportunity to make as many mistakes as you need without having a negative impact on a production environment. I’ve only recently started diving into MEMCM and there are so many cool features to learn about! My hope is that this lab will give you a fun/safe place to explore systems administration and grow in whatever direction you’re most passionate about. Let’s get started!
Step 1:
Have a device to host your test environment on…
My host device specs:
– i9-10850k CPU @ 3.60GHz (20CPUs)
– 32GB of DDR4 memory
– 1TB in NVMe storage as well as a 480GB SSD
– A fully updated Windows 10 OS
Microsoft Official Recommendations for the Lab Kit:
– 300 GB of available disk space or more
– High-throughput disk subsystem (fast read/write for your choice of storage)
– Up to 32 GB of memory
– A high end processor (All of the cores!)
– A fully updated Windows Server 2019 OS (We’re going to use Windows 10, which is just fine!)
You can technically create a lab with something significantly less powerful, but I think it’s worth the investment to get something decent if you can afford to. It’s an investment that could potentially help open doors to higher incomes down the road. It’s also nice to have something solid if you’re going to be working with it constantly!
Step 2:
Enable Hyper-V on your host machine!
If it’s not already installed…
1. Open “Turn Windows features on or off”
2. Check the box for “Hyper-V”
3. Click “OK”
4. Reboot!
Step 3:
Create an external switch in Hyper-V!
The Windows 10 and Office 365 deployment lab kit requires an external virtual switch for the setup script to run successfully. We’re going to create that now!
1. Open Hyper-V Manager! 
2. In the right-most “Actions” column, click “Virtual Switch Manager”
3. Select “New virtual network switch” > “External” > “Create Virtual Switch”
4. Name the switch “External” and click “OK”… if you see a warning… click “OK” again!
Awesome! We now have an external virtual network switch!
Step 4:
Download and install the Windows 10 and Office 365 deployment lab kit!
1. Download the Windows 10 and Office 365 Deployment Lab Kit here: Try Windows 10 and Office 365 Deployment Lab Kit on Microsoft Evaluation Center
2. Extract the zip file to a drive with at least 300GB of space (preferably your drive with the fastest read/write times)
3. Run the installation titled ‘setup.exe’ as administrator (make sure to have created an external virtual network switch before doing this or the setup will fail!)
4. Click next through the setup prompts! 
This will take roughly 15-20 minutes to complete the setup for most host machines. When the setup has finished completely, only HYD-DC1 and HYD-GW1 show as running within your Hyper-V Manager.
Here are some of the cool features and applications baked into the setup:
- Windows 10 Enterprise, Version 21H1
- Windows 7 Enterprise
- Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, Version 2103
- Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit for Windows 10
- Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
- Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V)
- Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring
- Windows Server
- Microsoft SQL Server
Step 5:
Turn off HYD-DC1 and HYD-GW1 within Hyper-V Manager!
1. Right click > Turn off
To make things more simple, we’re not going to use HYD-GW1 (Virtual Gateway) in our lab. You can leave it powered off going forward.
Step 6:
Configure your Domain Controller VM settings!
1. Right click HYD-DC1 within Hyper-V Manager
2. Under your “Hardware” options select “Memory”
3. Set your Maximum Memory to 2048MB (or higher if you have lots to spare) and leave “Enable Dynamic Memory” enabled.
Step 7:
Configure your Configuration Manager VM settings!
1. Right click HYD-CM1 within Hyper-V Manager
2. Under your “Hardware” options select “Memory”
3. Set your Maximum Memory to 8192MB (or higher if you have lots to spare) and leave “Enable Dynamic Memory” enabled.
4. Under “Hardware” > “Processor”, make sure to have at least two virtual processors for this host. However, if you have lots of cores, feel free to experiment with adding more later if you’re unhappy with its performance.
We’re nearing the end of the setup process! Hang in there! 🙂
Step 8:
Time to set up our NAT!
1. Open Hyper-V Manager
2. On the right, click “Virtual Switch Manager”
3. Click to highlight “HYD-CorpNet”
4. Select the radio option to change this from an “External Network” to an “Internal Network”
5. Open PowerShell ISE as an administrator
6. Copy and paste the following two lines of code into your script pane…
New-NetIPAddress –IPAddress 10.0.0.254 -PrefixLength 24 -InterfaceAlias “vEthernet (HYD-CorpNet)”
New-NetNat –Name HYD-CorpNetNATNetwork –InternalIPInterfaceAddressPrefix 10.0.0.0/24
Step 9:
Make sure everything works!
1. Connect to your HYD-DC1 and wait until you see the log on screen. This will allow Active Directory to talk with our servers and workstations.
2. Connect to HYD-CM1 and log in. The passwords for local “Administrator” and the domain admin account “CORP\LabAdmin” are both “P@ssw0rd”.
3. Verify we have internet connectivity on our CM server by opening PowerShell or Command Prompt and pinging “8.8.8.8”. If you don’t have connectivity, please go over the previous instructions to determine if any steps were missed.
4. Give our CM server another minute or so to let all of our services begin running.
5. Launch “Microsoft Endpoint Manager Configuration Manager Console” and make sure it launches without issue. 
Congratulations! You now have a lab with a fully functional domain, a CM server, and internet access!
Now, check out the official MEMCM documentation here and try to work through some of the tutorials! Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager documentation | Microsoft Docs
Take care!