Hey fellow sysadmins,

I’m working on expanding my Windows Server administration skills and setting up a proper lab for hands-on learning. I have 4 years of experience in IT support, EUC, Office 365, and Azure (L1/L2 tasks), along with some Linux experience (RHCSA, RHCE) and Azure (AZ-104) certification. Now, I want to dive deeper into Windows infrastructure.

Just moved to the USA from Canada and currently focused on interviews and job searching. I have a lot of free time right now, so I’m thinking of expanding my home lab./learning

I’d love your insights on how to approach this and any suggestions to improve my setup!

Lab Hardware:

• 128GB RAM, 2TB HDD server – Planning to run Hyper-V
• 128GB RAM, 1TB NVMe laptop – Additional workloads
• 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD laptop – Another test machine

Projects & Questions

1. Running Hyper-V for Free

• I want to set up Hyper-V and manage it via SCVMM.
• Can I use Hyper-V Server 2019/2022 for free, or is there a way to extend the 180-day trial?

2. Free Monitoring Solutions for Windows Servers

• Looking for a free monitoring tool to track server health, resource usage, and alerts.
• Considering Grafana, Prometheus, Node Exporter, or Zabbix. Which one works best for Windows Server monitoring?
• Open to any other free alternatives.

3. SCCM for Software Deployment & Patch Management

• Planning to install SCCM to practice software deployment and patch management.
• Anyone running SCCM in a lab environment? Any setup challenges to keep in mind?

4. Ansible Tower for Windows Updates & Automation

• I want to integrate Ansible Tower with SCCM for patching automation.
• Plan:
• Perform pre-patching health checks
• Stop applications/services
• Take a Hyper-V checkpoint
• Trigger SCCM patch deployment (e.g., by modifying collection group variables)
• Restart servers and verify patch success
• Has anyone implemented something similar? Looking for advice

5. Free PAM/PIM for Securing RDP Access

• I want to avoid direct RDP access and instead use a Privileged Access Management (PAM/PIM) solution.
• Ideally, users would connect to a portal first, then RDP into machines securely.
• Are there any free PAM solutions that can handle this?

6. Office 365 Administration

• I already have a tenant integrated with on-prem AD using Entra ID sync.
• Open to any best practices, tips, or tools for better Office 365 administration.

7. Free/Open-Source Backup Solutions

• Looking for a free or open-source backup system for lab data (local or cloud).
• Any lightweight backup solutions that work well in a home lab?

I want to level up my Windows Server administration skills and eventually become a pro.

Am I missing anything crucial? Any additional tools or concepts I should focus on? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thank you