Setting up a virtual lab with HYPER V on MacBook Pro (Part 1)

Few weeks back i decided to set up a virtual lab for a SharePoint 2013 SP1 development / testing farm. To make it bit more interesting i have selected a MacBook pro as my host machine :).

A quick note before i get started: INSTRUCTIONS IN THIS POST IS NOT FOR BEGINNER LEVEL. In this post i assume that you have a basic understanding of WINDOWS 2012 SERVER, DNS, DHCP, ACTIVE DIRECTORY, HYPER V  AND SHARE POINT 2013 FARM configurations.

Ok lets get straight to the point.

The hardware i will be using : (2.3 Ghz, Core i7, 16GB, 500gb)running OSX 10.9.2

On macbook pro i have Boot camp running and i have created a partition to run Windows 8.1. If you have used Boot Camp in the past then its pretty straight forward. If not, you might have to do bit of research and understand how boot camp works or You could do this whole exercise straight within your MAC OS with something like ORACLE's Virtual box . YOU DO NOT HAVE TO USE BOOT CAMP for this. 

Start up your computer and boot into MAC OS, then form the apple menu go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES option then click on START UP disk. Select BOOT CAMP as your start up disk then click on Restart.

you need to do this even if you have already set up Boot Camp as your start up disc. This is to enable virtualisation. if you boot straight into Windows, then run task manager  you will notice that virtualisation option is disabled. unfortunately there is no option to go into bios and manually enable it and without this HYPER V will not work.  

Once you have logged on to your windows OS you can activate Hyper V from programs and features, activate windows features screen. After Hyper V has been activated, first thing you need to do is to create a virtual switch with "Internal" option selected. 

From Hyper V manager, right click on the host to create new virtual machines for your lab. form host machine select the ISO files required to install the operating system on virtual machine.

in the next post i will be talking about how to install and configure Windows Server 2012, installing AD and setting up your domain controller then joining other servers to this domain. Finally i will go through the process of deploying a 3 server SharePoint 2013 farm.