PowerShell for the 70-697 Exam

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Hi Mike:

As I am watching the 70-697 Exam Course, I would like to know how I would go about setting up a lab? (Windows 10 Enterprise) Setting up accounts etc, just to setup a Demo Working Enterprise Environment and practice those PowerShell Cmdlets, I am in the process of buying a "new" Desktop Computer that would have Windows 10 pro so that I can take advantage of the Virtualisation?

CPU (SLAT or VTX CPU Support)
8GB of Ram or more (as seen in other ITPro.TV and other Documentation) the more RAM or Memory that you have the better the VMs would run)
1TB-2TB (my setup would probably have a 120-256GB SSD and a 1TB hard-drive)
If there's anything that I left please let me know

My new goal now is to write the other exam 70-697 by April 18th 2019, and hopefully giving me enough time should I need to re-write this exam again.

My other goal as wel is to write the Office 365 Exam (70-346 and 70-347) which I think leads to the MCSA (MCSA: Office 365 certification) Which I think also ends on April 30th 2019?

Any input on this would be great

Dan L.

@Daniel-Loyer

One thing I have found with my own laptop, is disk contention quickly becomes a bottleneck. My laptop's original configuration was
256GB solid state drive, where OS was installed
1TB spinning drive for storage (VMs)
32GB RAM, thank you ITProTV :))

What I found, is that if I ran more than two VMs at the same time, performance took a hit. Memory and CPU weren't the problem. When I monitored performance, I was seeing 100% disk utilization on my D drive (the 1TB spinning disk)

Then I upgraded my spinning disk to a 1TB Samsung SSD 860 EVO. WOW! No performance issues when running FIVE VMs at the same time!

So my recommendation would be to use SSD for all drives. They are a little more expensive, but well worth it. Even if it means smaller drives.

For the OS, look at 250GB SSD. You could use a 120GB SSD.

For the storage drive, as much SSD as you can afford. 500GB can store a lot of virtual machines. (My VMs average around 50GB each)

If you are going to do VMs on a workstation, I suggest one per hard drive because of disk thrashing from them. I picked up a Refubished HP DL360e Gen8 with 15 month Carepaq for $1200. I added all four 7200 RPM SAS 1TB drives. I did two RAID 1 arrays, 2 per array on a P222 512MB cached SAS controller to get better performance.

https://wp.scsiraidguru.com has my VMWare setup stuff on it.