FEATURED LAB ENVIRONMENTS
MECM / SCCM Standalone Primary Site
Complete SCCM Current Branch lab with Remote SQL Server, WSUS patching boundary groups, and PXE boot OSD task sequences.
Entra ID Hybrid Join & Intune Autopilot
Microsoft Entra Connect sync linked with Intune tenant. Testing zero-touch Autopilot OOBE profiles and Win32 application deployments.
VMware vSphere & vCenter Server
Nested vSphere cluster with vMotion and vSAN testing. Managing virtual machine templates and automated snapshot rollbacks.
LAB ROADMAP & EXPERIMENTS
CORE TEST TOPOLOGIES
Domain Controller Node
MECM Primary Site Server
vCenter Appliance (VCSA)
Entra Connect & Intune Gateway
HYPERVISOR & HARDWARE STACK
Custom Host Node (Compute)
"AMD Ryzen 12-Core / 24-Thread CPU, 128GB DDR4 ECC RAM, dual 2.5GbE NICs."
Storage Array & Virtual Disks
"4TB NVMe Gen4 RAID-0 array for IOPS-heavy VM disks + 12TB TrueNAS backup pool."
NETWORKING & VIRTUAL SWITCHING
pfSense Virtual Firewall
"Isolated VLANs for Corporate Clients, DMZ Services, Management, and Test subnets."
Hyper-V & ESXi vSwitches
"Internal trunked switches configuring 802.1Q VLAN tagging and NAT routing for cloud sync."
ARCHITECTURE BREAKDOWNS
MECM & Intune Co-Management Lab
Simulating enterprise workload shifts from legacy SCCM to cloud Intune. Testing compliance policies, BitLocker keys, and Windows Autopatch rings.
- Real-world policy testing
- Zero production risk
- Tenant sync latency
Technical Configuration Notes
The lab uses a Windows Server 2022 Domain Controller with Entra Connect sync running every 30 minutes. Windows 11 virtual clients perform Hybrid Entra ID joins, receiving Intune policies while maintaining SCCM client agent communications for software metering.
VMware ESXi 8.0 & vCenter Cluster
Nested ESXi virtual cluster running under Type-1 Hypervisor. Used to test host failover, distributed vSwitches, and storage vMotion migrations.
- Fast snapshot rollbacks
- Full datacenter emulate
- High RAM overhead
Technical Configuration Notes
Nested hypervisor configuration with promiscuous mode enabled on virtual switches. Allows testing vCenter Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) cluster upgrades and automated VM template cloning via PowerCLI scripts.
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