Ah, DevOps, such a buzz word now. It seems that everyone wants to bring Operations and Development together, in a harmonious gathering of intellectual minds. To get in on the action, I wanted to do some hands on development, with a little saucy operation to go with it, and so wanted to experiment with some home server shenanigans.
Why bother, I hear you say, why not just use the existing cloud services I hear you cry. Well, I really don’t have an explanation, other than to say, why not. Sometimes, a workplace environment may not be in a position to use the various cloud services, and may have to host everything themselves, so its worth having a bit of experience with such a situation. So, I bring to you my experience of setting it all up, using Windows Hyper-V.
Firstly, a little bit of background as to what I already had, before I get in to the most recent information with regards to my little home development environment.
Equipment
The existing Hyper-V server
I have always had the drive to have my own little server at home, primarily to run my own instance of Microsoft Dynamics, simply because for development purposes, it was too expensive to have an online instance for general experimentation. As a result, quite a while ago, I purchased a small Intel NUC small form factor PC to run Hyper-V on, and host my development environments. This was an Intel i7 PC, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 1TB Hard Disk. It was a small machine, took very little power, and since Windows 10 Pro also provided Hyper-V Virtualisation, there was no need for it to run Windows Server. On this PC, I set up a Virtual Machine to host Active Directory, and then a second Virtual Machine where I was able to install Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics. This provided me with a nice little CRM test environment. Overtime, I hit a little snag when my requirements overstretched the little machine, as I needed other Virtual Machines to host other bits and bobs, and the initial CRM VM also became bogged down with the amount of different CRM organisations I was running. It was time for an upgrade.
Hyper-V server, the second coming
So, keeping with the excellent experience I had with the intel NUC, I decided to get a new one, but the latest version. This little baby was the latest i7, it had a maximum of 32GB of RAM, but otherwise was pretty similar to the original one.
https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/kits/nuc7i7bnh.html
Coupled with 32GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD for the operating system, and a 2 TB 2.5 inch Drive, it was ready to receive Windows 10 Professional.
Installing Windows 10 was easy, then adding Hyper-V, and then moving my VM’s across to it. With the 32GB of memory, I was able to increase the memory of the Dynamics Virtual Machine to give it space to grow, and I still had memory left over.
Enabling the server for remote desktop access enabled me to unplug it from the screen and keyboard, and position it out of the way, simply connected to power and ethernet. And there it sits, chugging away.
Servers in action
And this is what they look like.
