Since I recently completed my studying for the 70-640 Active Directory exam and passed the exam I have moved onto the 70-642 Network Infrastructure exam. I have just started studying and building out the baseline for my labs. So far it simply consists of 2 Server 2008 R2 servers and 2 Windows 7 Enterprise workstations. You can see in the below image under the “70-642 Lab” folder in VMware Workstation

Some of the labs will be coming from the Self-Paced Training Kit Exam 70-642, some based on TechNet and others from testing things I have read about on the exam objectives or simply want to experiment with. Most of the books I use are from my www.safaribooksonline.com subscription which works really well for me. The way I like to change books makes this a much easier and cheaper way to access these resources.  It’s also great to pick up on reading whether I am on my iPhone, Desktop or tablet.

Since this is the first time I thought it may be useful for some people to know what my lab setup is like. I do all of my labs on my primary desktop that I use for everything else that I upgraded a couple years ago. So far it gives me more than enough performance for what I need.

**Hardware

**

• AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU @ 3.2GHz
• 12GB Memory
• OCZ Vertex-2 80GB SSD
• Western Digital Black 1TB Hard Drive

Software

• Windows 8 Enterprise
• VMware Workstation 9