Launch Your Lab Pod

Welcome to *Managing Hyper-V Infrastructure with SCVMM & SCOM*. This course runs on a live two-VM Windows Server pod:

• mgmt01 — your management box: Active Directory domain controller, SQL Server, SCVMM, and SCOM.
• hyperv01 — a Hyper-V host (with nested virtualization) that SCVMM manages and SCOM monitors.

In a real deployment these roles live on separate servers. We consolidate them here so the whole stack fits one lab pod — the curriculum calls out the production separation as we go.

Step 1 — Launch the pod

From the course page, click Launch lab pod. The platform provisions both VMs from the Windows Server 2022 blueprint, joins them to the lab.local domain, and brings them to *running*. A Windows pod takes longer to provision than a single Linux VM — watch the per-VM progress strip on the lab page.

Step 2 — Connect with RDP

Open mgmt01 and click Connect. A browser remote-desktop session opens. Sign in with the lab administrator account shown on the VM detail page.

Step 3 — Confirm both hosts are reachable

In the mgmt01 PowerShell console, confirm hyperv01 answers:

Test-NetConnection hyperv01 -CommonTCPPort WINRM

You should see TcpTestSucceeded : True.

Why this matters

This pod is the same shape as a small production virtualization stack: a management plane (AD + SQL + SCVMM + SCOM) and a compute host (Hyper-V). Every lab from here builds on it.

Next lesson: verify the Active Directory domain that ties the pod together.