Since I had
some bench time, I was checking out Amazon Web Services. I found that it was
relatively easy to build a full, free (for a year) functioning lab.
It turns out AWS has a free tier 12-month trial for new
users. I simply signed in with my Amazon account and they spun up a default Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) pretty much immediately. The free
tier limits you to micro VMs (2 proc, 612 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD, up to 2 NICs) for Windows servers. The free tier gets you 750 free hours of uptime. So, that’s one instance up all month long or
several for short periods. The free tier licensed OS images for Windows are:
- Server 2012
- Server 2008 R2
- Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server Express and IIS
- Server 2008
- Server 2003
The look and feel of Amazon EC2 took a little while to
figure out (I highly recommend the Getting Started guides and pay attention to
what Security Groups do), and it did take a few days to get everything built
since the install was operating off of lower resources than would be typical
and I had other priorities to tend to. It is possible to alter instance
resources any time the machine is down, so it costs only a few bucks to do the installation
on an instance with higher resources and then back it down before putting it
into the lab.
Coupled with my MSDN account, I was able to put
together a lab including: DC, CA, Exchange 2010 AIO, Lync 2010 SE, Lync 2013
SE, SCOM 2012. There are plenty of connectivity options and the environment
seems very secure so far (of course it does), so I haven’t had any problems connecting
and feel like I have done a good job limiting unwanted traffic/access.
I shut down the machines when I am not actively using them, so I only gave up $2.01 last month for the lab. If I start to grow this, I might set up some scheduled tasks for server shutdowns since I did manage to go to bed the other night with all of my machines up resulting in 60 hours of lost free lab time.
-ponboquod-
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