Hyper-V On-The-Go or “To Boldly Lab Where No-One Has Lab’d Before!”

This is an into to a multi-part series on building portable labs.

Boldly Going

One thing I have found invaluable throughout my career has been the ability to maintain a decent lab environment, something that has been an ongoing struggle over the years. Early on it was all about the hardware. One of my earliest labs grew to roughly 15+ Frankenstein mini-tower systems I had cobbled together into a learning tool for learning to work with Novell/Windows NT, Banyan Vines, TCP/IP  (replacing IPX/SPX at the time) plus a whole bunch of old-timer stuff I won’t bore you with here.

Over time, technology changed and my lab with it. KVMs let me remove several monitors and reduced hot-swapping problems. Combined server roles like Small Business Server (SBS) let me reduce the number of lab-production machines to basically one box.
Virtualization with VMWare got me down to 4 boxes total and when Hyper-V finally arrived with WS-2008, I was able to run my lab with 2 Microsoft (MS) Hypervisors boxes running beefed up RAM and HDDs.
This lasted a few years until the hardware finally succumbed to its age and died on me. I decided to try rack-mount systems (I went with used because I am WAY too cheap for new) and am still engineering that particular solution. If my free time allows for it, I may try documenting that in another series.

Setting a Course

What this series will focus on is the portability of lab environments and how to work with them. While travelling for work and I’ve observed this as an issue for myself and many of the people I work with.
Like many in the industry, I spend a lot of time on the road and often do not always have access to my permanent lab environment. I needed a local solution I could easily keep with me and was self-contained, quickly configurable and easily shared with team members in a pinch. I also wanted lightweight since my bag was heavy enough already. 😎

Basic Hardware Setup

I write this with the understanding our work PCs (in my case a Surface Book Pros) are fixed on RAM and Drive-space and the options to change them limited at best, but as long as your RAM is at least 16GB, the right external drive solution will fix the drive-space limits (usually 256/512GB) inflicted on our machines. 

NOTE: 8GB of RAM would work but you would be limited to 1 or 2 VM’s running max.

After much research and testing various drives on my machine I settled on the SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable External SSD (USB-C, USB 3.1)

With a capacity of 2 Terabytes SSD, it has more than enough space to hold my Lab VMs as well as any ISOs I may need to build a new lab. It comes in a rugged case and is amazingly light. It has a USB-C connection and the cable comes with a USB-3.1 adapter. I found its performance on both ports to be exemplary. I have had many VMs running concurrently and the combined SSD/USB-3 has never been an issue on my machine.
My main limiting factor has always been the RAM. I’ve used this drive on my 32GB laptop with no discernable performance degradation.

For secondary storage I added an SD (micro in this case) to each of my machines to house lab configs, scripts, extra ISOs or other files I might need in a pinch if I happened to be caught without my LabDrive.
I went with the SanDisk Ultra 128GB microSDHC UHS-I card (it came with a  SD adapter):

It was the largest available at the time and is designed for photography so it is one of the faster SDs out there (98MB/s).

Setting the Environment (5 Years?!?)

I hope you find the hardware recommendations useful in your lab endevours. I do NOT recommend running an external lab drive on any USB port less than USB-3, the performance hit is too crippling to the lab’s performance. A USB-3 HDD can be used but for better, more consistent performance I would stick with SSDs.

In an upcoming blog, I will cover tips for setting up the environment and tweaking configurations. I will also cover enabling Hyper-V and some changes to defaults you need to be wary of when working with a lab drive. I will also demonstrate PowerShell vs GUI configurations as automation is the key to rapidly deploying a functioning lab.

There is an excellent tutorial here by Jaromir Kaspar that goes into rapidly deploying labs in 2016 and Windows 10. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re craving better automation.

More Blogs in the ‘Boldly Going” Series

1. Hardware Considerations for Portable Labs
2. Enabling the Hyper-V Engine
3. Reclaiming Drivespace
4. Sending Files to Your VMs (Part 1)
5. Sending Files to Your VMs (Part 2)
6. Sending Files to Your VMs (Part 3)
7. Changing the Lab VM State
8. Lab Maintenance (pending)