David Fowler has a new series on building a test lab, starting with a domain controller:
One of the most useful tools to the DBA when we need to test new features, recreate a fault that we’ve seen in production or just want to see ‘what if…?’ is a test lab.
Some of you are going to be lucky enough to have a few servers kicking around or a chunk of the virtual environment that you can build a test lab in but not all of us do. In this series of posts I’m going to look at how we can build up a fully functioning test lab consisting of a domain and clustered SQL Servers on our desktop PC. Now, although I’m going to be building this environment on my desktop, the main steps will be the same if you’ve got separate hardware for this so may still be relevant.
So, in this series we’re going to build a virtual test lab that’s going to consist of a domain controller and a couple of SQL Servers in a Windows Failover Cluster, hosting an Availability Group.
Read on for a step-by-step guide using Virtualbox to build these VMs.