Hi.

I'm in the midst of setting up the lab environment. I have a server borrowed from work with 8 GBs of RAM and 140 GBs of hard drive space. I've got Hyper-V installed and working.

I've read over the great advice in this thread and the various links mentioned. Unfortunately I am finding that I'm still not quite clear on what is being suggested in terms of the setting up the 6 VMs.

I think I understand the idea of the parent/child differing disks configuration for SQL-A, SQL-B, SQL-C and SQL-D (although I have one big question which I ask below) but what about the DC and SQL-Core VMs? Is the idea that the DC and SQL-Core VMs do not need to be a part of this parent/child differing disks arrangement? Instead, these are set up as 'regular' VMs?

Koen suggests installing SQL Server on the parent virtual disk first. Does this mean we don't follow the install instructions in Chapter 1 of the training kit then, which seem to suggest we do the SQL install separately on each of SQL-A, SQL-B, etc and use this Kim_Ackers domain account (also meaning the DC needs to be in place first).

If somebody can add some clarity for me, I would be most appreciative!