Creating Environments for Testing

I’ve said during rants about career options, building a lab to test is essential to your development as an IT professional. I‘ve pointed out where you can find a treasure-trove of IT books (http://it-ebooks.info/) and also where you can get free training (Microsoft Virtual Academy).  Using these two site resources you get the books and the training, now you can use the Microsoft Virtual Labs to get to play around with the technologies you read and learned.

Now the third part of your learning process should stem around practicing what you have learned. I’ve said in previous posts that you should establish a lab to test learned technologies so that you when you need to execute them in the real world, you’ll be more effective. Testing requires having some lab environment that mimics the real world. Unfortunately, this is where you can run into a few challenges trying to establish the appropriate environment. This is why I recommend using the Microsoft Virtual Labs - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/virtuallabs

Using Microsoft Virtual Labs

The main advantage is that is provides a ready-made environment so that you can practice what you learned.  You don’t have to spend any time setting up a test environment which is often the most laborious and costly side of testing. I’ve worked in support for a long time (too much in my opinion) and the need to have available environment to test customer issues that critical to understanding a resolving customer issues.

It can be costly and very time consuming to have enterprise solutions like SharePoint is testing format. Even if you are using virtual solutions (Hyper-V or VMWare), this is still an expensive technology because it takes lots of disk space and memory (RAM). This does not include the processing power needed to effectively run a “usable” installation. Sure you can get by using these methods with a simple SQL solutions or even a barebones SharePoint environment, but those are often not the best environment to test solutions that are of the enterprise variety.

One of the only downsides is that each virtual lab environment is that is expires in 90 minutes. That may not seem like a long time but it is generally sufficient to test when the all configuration has been done. The obviously con is that if you build out a lab environment with a lot of configuration that will be lost.  Therefore, it’s important that you factor that restriction in your testing. This is for testing issues that can be reproduced quickly or for learning and not for testing solutions that require hours to produce.