Lab environment in a small package

Having a lab environment for testing and learning is really important when you are in the it industry and working in the client management field is no exception. Today there are a lot of possibilities where you make a virtual environment on almost any computer. In a company environment you might use a part of the production environment but there are times when you want to be able bend and tweak without having to take the production in to consideration.  You can of course run a lab environment on you on computer, which I done many situations, but it will take resources from your work machine and your work machine has to be more powerful.    

An alternative which I have found attractive is to use a small separate computer which is small enough to fit everywhere, even in your hand, and powerful enough to run a entire lab environment whit many machines. In my case I chose the Intel NUC version 10 as a suitable platform to build on where you get a create machine with a lot of options. 

In my labs I normally run five or six computers at the same time so I need a lot of CPU and memory. I chose the following configuration: 

• 1 x Intel NUC 10 Performance Kit | NUC10i7FNH
• 2 x HyperX Impact Black SO-DIMM DDR4 2666MHz 32GB
• 1 x Samsung SSD 970 EVO PLUS NVMe M.2 500GB
• 1 x Samsung 870 QVO SATA 2.5" 1TB

This configuration gave me an environment with 6 cores (12 threads), 64GB RAM and 1,5TB hard disk space which will be more then enough for now.

If you want to learn how to run Windows Hyper-V Server 2019 on Intel NUC 10 continue to read my article, Windows Hyper-V Server 2019 on Intel NUC. To get more information about how to assemble your Intel NUC I can recommend the following article, Build an Intel NUC (external link).

Remember to update BIOS firmware and disable hardware or features that you are not gone use.