From the course: Advanced PowerShell: Automating Active Directory Administration

Lab setup

From the course: Advanced PowerShell: Automating Active Directory Administration

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Lab setup

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- [Robert] Prior to creating scripts and running all these different cmdlets, I'd like to show you what the lab setup is, and this is always a big request from many of the learners who watch my courses. They want to know a high level view of how everything's set up. So when we do type something or create something, you have context at what you're looking at. So you take a look, we've got these two different servers. We have DC 1 and DC 2 for the linkedin.int domain. And we're going to be using Windows 2022 standard servers. You could also use data center. It doesn't really matter because these particular functions are available in both different versions. Now, DC 1 is already going to be a domain controller, but DC 2 is not. It's just going to be a server that I need to join to the domain and then go ahead and make it a domain controller which we'll be doing all within PowerShell. Now also, we have a client, a Client 01, which is just a plain old Windows 11 computer we're going to join to our Active Directory domain, again, using PowerShell. In this course I tried to keep the setup as simple as possible so that way when we run our PowerShell commands it will make a lot more sense. This particular course is going to focus just on on-premises Active Directory, but if you go to the LinkedIn Learning course catalog and you type in my name, you'll also find out I have many other courses that are also involved with Azure Active Directory as well as Microsoft 365 products. You'll notice a switch that's right in the middle of all these different icons, and that's a virtual switch and that's because I'm using virtual machines with Windows Hyper-V that are going to be connected using this virtual switch, and they'll be on the 192.168.21.0/24 network. That means that I can use hosts from .1 through .254 for anything that I would like to add into our domain. In my case, although it doesn't show it, .1 is the firewall, and that's how we get out to the internet, but we're not going to be using the internet very much in this course so I left that out of the lab setup, but that's how we'll be getting out is through the host computer and then off into the firewall. Now that you've seen the lab and how it's set up, you have a high level view of how we'll proceed with cmdlets, scripts, and many other features of managing Active Directory using PowerShell.

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