Chapter 2. Setting up your lab environment
Configuration Manager is a hands-on product, so it’s important to have a good lab environment for all of your testing and learning. Setting up ConfigMgr from scratch can be daunting; it sits on top of several prerequisite applications, all of which have to be installed and configured correctly before you can install ConfigMgr, such as the following:
- Microsoft Windows Server
- Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK)
The versions of each prerequisite application vary from environment to environment.
Figure 2.1 shows how the lab environment hangs together, how and where all of the prerequisite applications are installed, and which version you’ll use.
This environment is a bit complicated, but this is the absolute minimum amount of setup required to create your own ConfigMgr lab environment. And you do need a safe, self-contained lab environment, even if you have access to ConfigMgr in your current environment. Getting things wrong in ConfigMgr can lead to some particularly undesirable outcomes (such as wiping production servers), so you definitely want to run your labs isolated away from the wider network.