I have one more challenge for you. Equipped with the knowledge and experience you’ve gained from this book, build a complete, highly reliable web environment—from scratch. This chapter is fairly short and doesn’t require a whole lunch to read, but as a lab it’s big and complicated—it may take several hours or even days to complete, over the course of several lunches. You can come back to this lab anytime, or create your own challenge. This chapter is meant to give you something to shoot for if you want to try to put it all together. Go ahead and give it a quick read, and when you’re ready, fire up some VMs and give it a try.
If you take this challenge, keep in mind that you’ll likely get stuck and run into problems. Use these problems as opportunities to try out the resources discussed in previous chapters. Explore the forums and the internet for answers. Refer back to sections in this book when you need to and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I’ve learned the most by breaking things.
This “final exam” requires a new set of VMs—and perhaps some additional ones—to support the WFF and ARR high availability. The first section takes you through the requirements for those VMs, and the last section is the lab.
You can change the lab to suit your own needs, and I encourage you to explore different setups. My solution to this lab will be on MoreLunches.com, along with the rest of the lab answers from this book.