There are some limitations to my permissions and what I can do and can not do when it comes to my work scope with the recent role change. We have corporate lab environment for us to test new things and make sure things are working as expected before being pushed out to the production environment. But firstly, it will take some time for me to apply for the permissions I need, even in the lab environment; secondly, even in the corporate lab environment, it’s still not 100% under my control and some things I need for my tests or I want to test with might not be available either. So I was wondering why I don’t just set up my own lab environment, especially most of the service providers provide some evaluation versions of their products, like Microsoft.
Ok, let’s do it!
I have spent the past month, ,mainly weekends, to set up my on-premise AD environment, with domain controllers, SQL server, SCCM and several working clients, and also integrate it with the Azure platform. It’s been almost 6 years since I got the systematic training on Windows server (it was Windows server 2012 that I tested with), so there are a lot of differences, especially as with the recent versions, Microsoft, like most of other service providers, are trying to embrace and put more focus on the cloud. So, it’s not an easy journey. I have read a lot of KB articles, making many mistakes and then searching online for solutions, but finally, I got the basic infrastructure ready today. Cool!
The next step is I will test what I am puzzled with or I am not quite sure about for some of my work tasks. I am almost sure that I will face new problems, but I am confident with my own lab environment for me to do almost anything I want and also with the online resources, I will get the problem fixed. It may take just some time, but that’s ok, because that’s how it works to learn new things.
It’s the journey of settings up the infrastructure for now that impressed me a lot and makes me think some more. I was thinking it’s too much complicated to set up the infrastructure, especially what I was trying to do was to create a similar environment as the one of my company, considering it’s a big company and the infrastructure is quite complicated. It almost made me give in with what I thought of and expected for the problems and troubles I would face, but I started anyway. And then things began to change a little bit not long after the start, and then more and more. Things are not that complicated any more, considering what I need to test is mainly what puzzles me most and the new features I want to test with. I admit that if I stick to the original plan to build a similar environment as my company environment, I will end up with nothing, but it turns out that I don’t need to.
It feels like something in the life. We always want something big, sometimes it’s too big that it just freaks us out and we can not even get started, thinking there is no point for us to spend any time in it because we will fail anyway. But if we are brave enough to take the first step, then things are changing and sometimes, it’s so different from what we expected. We will not succeed immediately because if it’s really something worth doing, it should not be an easy win, but we know we can at least have a try and we have the chance to make it happen.
So, let’s see what I will experience with my lan environment.