Yesterday we had an introduction into setting up a virtual lab to help the DBA learn and test new technologies while improving his/her own skill set.

Today we will continue to discuss the building of a virtual lab.  Today we will get a little closer to the SQL portion of things as we will be installing a familiar operating system to SQL Server.

The Operating System will be 2008.  And the version of SQL Server will be 2008 R2.  I chose these specifically because at the time that I built out my lab, I was setting up the environment to help me study for the MCM exams.

As a sidebar, I was just informed by a friend of another blog series that is also currently discussing setting up Virtual Machines in Virtual Box.  Fortunately, his series is based on Windows 2012 and SQL 2012 – so there is a bit of a difference.  The author of that series is Matt Velic and you can read his articles on the topic here.

I’ll be honest, upon hearing that news I had to go check out his articles to make sure I wasn’t doing the exact same thing.  And while there may be a little overlap, it looks like we have different things that we are covering.

And now that brings us to recap time.

• Virtual Storage – 10^th Day
• Death and Destruction, err Deadlocks - 9^th Day
• SSRS Schedules – 8^th Day
• Runaway Jobs – 7^th Day
• Maintenance Plan Gravage – 6^th Day
• Table Compression – 5^th Day
• Exercise for msdb – 4^th Day
• Backup, Job and Mail History Cleanup – 3^rd Day
• Service Broker Out of Control – 2^nd Day
• Maint Plan Logs – 1^st Day

On the Eleventh Day of pre-Christmas…

The next pre-requisite for this lab is to install a Domain Controller and Active Directory.  For this Domain Controller, I have the following Virtual Box settings.

• A single Dynamic Virtual Disk of 20GB
• 2 Network Adapters (1 NAT and 1 Internal)
• 1024 MB memory

To install the operating system, we will mount the iso image the same as we did for the FreeNAS in yesterdays post.  This is a Windows setup, and I will not cover that.

Once you have installed the operating system, the first thing to do is to install the guest additions for Virtual Box.

With guest additions installed, next we will turn to the network adapters.  I have two adapters installed for good reason.  One adapter is visible to the virtual network and will be used for the VMs to talk to each other.  The second adapter is installed so I can get windows validated and so patches can be downloaded and installed.

Talking about patches, this is where we want to make sure the operating system is patched.  Run windows update, finish all of the requisite reboots, and then come back to the network control panel.  Prior to installing the domain, disable the external NIC.  We will do this to limit the potential for errors when joining the subsequent machines to the domain.

For the Internal adapter, I will also configure a static IP address as shown here.

Let’s now setup the domain and domain controller on this machine.  From Server Manager, right click roles and select Add Roles.  From the new screen, select Active Directory Domain Services and DNS Server.

You are now ready to configure your domain.  I am going to allow you to use your favorite resource for the directions on configuring a domain in Windows 2008.  After the domain has been configured, then enable the external network adapter.

The final step is to configure DNS.  The main concern in DNS to configure is the reverse lookup zones.  I have three subnets (network address ranges) that I will configure.  The relevance of these three zones will become apparent in the final article of the lab setup mini-series.  The configurations will be along the lines as seen in this next screenshot.

This gets us to where we can start building our SQL Cluster.  We will cover that in the next installment.