 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. My name is Jaramir and welcome to my session. My session is called Testing Windows Server 2025 with MSLab. I'm the guy who wrote MSLab when I was in Microsoft. I really like sharing this information because this is the tool that will help you a lot. Trust me. I'm now working with Dell. I'm an engineering technologist working with the product managers in Dell with the customers and also with the product managers in Microsoft just to make sure that we deliver the best products possible. So what's MSLab? If you've never heard about MSLab, it's just a tool that will help you to test Windows Server or any builds, any new builds, or even an Azure Stack HCI. Why you want to use this tool is that if there is a new build and you want to test it, you need to have some kind of infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be like a domain controller. You want to have Windows Server Core. You want to have Windows Server with a GUI just to see what's new in the GUI. You maybe just need to see if there is any new PowerShell command and you don't want to bloat your production infrastructure. And you want to test, for example, what's new in Active Directory and you cannot just simply join it into your production environment. So with this tool, you can simply deploy fully functional environment where you have your machine's domain joined and you can also simulate some kind of networking. So you can test advanced things like network ATC in Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server 2025. So let's take a look what the MSLab tool really is. It's just a bunch of scripts. So when you will go to address aka.ms.msLab or if you just simply Bing MSLab, hopefully it will be the first page. If not, just Bing MSLab GitHub and then it will be definitely the first page. So what you will find there is there's a zip file that you can download. And in this zip file, you have these scripts. And to use these scripts, it's super simple. You just fire up the first script. You don't even have to run any PowerShell from the command line. The only thing you have to do is just right click and run with the PowerShell. What it will do, it will create some folders. Then you will fire up the second script. It will ask you for the ISO file. Just provide it Windows Server 2022. The reason is that if you will provide the Windows Server 2025, it will create a domain controller with Windows Server 2025. And then it will fail to deploy it because there's some known bug. So you will have to wait for the newer release as now Windows Server 2025 is in the preview. And this is a known bug, unfortunately. So just provide it Windows Server 2022 and it will do its job. So it will create this domain controller automatically and it also creates a parent disk. I call it parent disks because these disks are then used to create virtual machines. So you can define what virtual machine you want to have and just simply point it to the parent VHD. So you'll just configure it if you want to use Windows Server with a GUI or Windows Server Core. So it's like a Swiss knife, right? So once you will finish this first stage that will take like 45 minutes to create this DC and parent disks, the next step is just simply deploy the lab. You don't have to modify anything. You can just run deploy just for the first time, right? Because you don't know what to expect. And if you run it, it will simply import the DC that was created in the first step and it will just deploy for virtual machines. So as a first lab, when you hit deploy, you will see domain controller and then for S2D nodes. This is on Windows Server 2022 by default. And as you can see, four S2D nodes. And in these nodes, you will have like 10 different VLANs that you can play with. You have multiple disks. And then you can just follow MS lab scenarios just to create a cluster. But today we want to talk about how to test Windows Server 2025. So with Windows Server 2025, you have to first create your parent disk, right? So when you will be creating a lab, you have to point it to the VHD and to create extra VHD or any VHD, not only Windows Server 2025, but Azure Stack HCI operating system, Windows 10, Windows 11 or yeah, Windows 10 or Windows 11 or even older operating system. You can go back to Windows Server 2008, if you really want to. However, if you will navigate into the MS lab folder into the parent disks, you can go and the right click, create parent disk PS1. And once you create a run with PowerShell, it will simply ask you to provide the ISO file. So you can provide it ISO file and the next thing it will do, it will find a VIM file inside the ISO file and it will ask you what version of the operating system you want to use. So you will select either if you want to use a GUI or Core or you can just, you know, fire up whatever you want. And then the next time you will run it again, you can choose whatever you want again. So you end up with multiple VHDs. In this case, I created two VHDs, one for the Windows Server GUI and one with the Windows Server Core. You can see it by the name. It's Windows Server Insider and there is also the version. And the next step is to modify your LAP config. So this LAP config is defined what should be created in the lab. As you can see, it's pretty simple. The only thing you have to have or you have to keep is the domain admin name, the password and then, you know, the addition of the DC, if you want to have an internet or not, if you want to connect this lab to the internet and then you will specify the name of the parent disks. In this case, core for the core machine and GUI for the GUI machine. And as a result, if you run deploy in let's say five minutes, maybe even less, if you just simply right click and run with PowerShell, you will have this lab. DC and then domain joined server core and server with the GUI. And as you can see, it's not consuming almost any memory. So you can run it in any machine in your laptop. So what to do if you have this lab and if you want to play with real world stuff, let's take a look about hands-on lab that I created for you, especially for this session. So this lab is located on Dell Geos GitHub. Just bring it, bring this name. And what you will find out, there is a page that points you here. And it will be also below the video. And I will, you know, I will answer your question in the comments if you have any. And this is an end-to-end guide to create S2D cluster with Windows 7 2025 in your laptop. So this is what it will deploy. As you can see, it will deploy it in let's say 12 minutes and you will have a domain controller. You will have a machine for the management where you will connect to and where you will manage everything from and the rest of the machines are server cores, two for the storage spaces direct and one for the Windows admin center gateway. So this is the result. You will have two machines up and running. If you will follow the guide, you will deploy everything with a PowerShell. So hopefully you will learn something new. And yep, you have two fully functional nodes. And let's take a look in the demo, I guess. Cool. So in the demo, I want to show you my Hyper-V manager in my laptop. But first I want to show you the page that if you will just simply Bing for Dell Geo's GitHub, you will navigate to the hands-on labs. You will find here lab guides. These lab guides are, or one of the lab guides is testing Windows Server Insider. And this is, as I mentioned, step-by-step document where you will deploy the lab with the lab config that you will specify. And then either you will just choose option one, just go with the PowerShell ISC and just paste the code. Or there's an option two where I will describe everything what's happening. So for example, configure memory dump and power plan. And there's a PowerShell script. So you will just simply copy it and paste it into the PowerShell and just observe what's happening. And so this is the lab itself. Let me just connect to the management machine and let me log in into this machine with the default password. And as you can see, here's storage-pasted data cluster. There's a file share witness here. We do have, we don't have any role. We don't have any virtual machine here. We have two nodes with Windows Server 2025 data center with two disks. We also do have networks configured with Network ATC. So you can test Network ATC. And as you can see, these networks are in VLAN 7.11 and 7.12. So even the VLANs are working here because in LabConfig you can specify additional VLANs that you want to create so the machines can use it. And what's interesting is that each machine has two network adapters. And so it really looks like real environment. And if you think about it, you can run real storage-pasted data cluster in your laptop. And as you can see, it consumes almost nothing. There's like two gigs per node, less than two gigs per node, management machine, domain controller, and then Windows Admin Center Gateway. So I will ask you, if you like the session, please, this is something we really need is evaluation. Please navigate to the page, provide us feedback. If you like the session, if you want to know more, if you want to record even the one-hour session about MSLab, how it works, I'm open to it. Let us know in the evaluation and please, please comment under the video if you have any question or just ping me. Thank you very much for this. And if you have any questions, simply ping me on this email address or just find me on Twitter and just ping me on Twitter anytime.