Lability tutorial

A tutorial for working with Lability

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lability-tutorial

Hello, GitHub 👨‍💻

This is a tutorial for working with Lability.

I recently found Lability and really came to like it. However, I found it a bit hard to get started with. I am writing this tutorial to help people get started with this dope module for building Hyper-V test labs. I hope it’s useful. ❤

Feedback and pull requests are welcome! Open issues or submit PRs on Github.

On this page

Tutorial status

This tutorial not yet complete - below you can find a table of contents / to do list. Where a chapter has been started (not necessarily completed!), there will be a link to the chapter; where a chapter has not yet been started, there will be a list of things to cover.

Target audience

Who should read this tutorial?

  • I assume a mid-level Powershell background. You should be comfortable reading and writing Powershell scripts.
  • I assume at least a passing familiarity with Powershell DSC. You may not have written a DSC configuration before, but you should understand at a high level what DSC is for and be willing to research concepts you don’t understand.
  • You should be able to use the Hyper-V GUI tools on a Windows client OS (such as Windows 10 Pro). We don’t do anything too complex with Hyper-V in this tutorial, but you should understand basic concepts like VMs, VHDs, VSwitches, and so forth.

Tutorial chapters

  1. An introduction to Lability: a brief intro describing Lability and its documentation.

  2. A simple configuration: a very simple lab that starts just one virtual machine.

    • Powershell DSC configuration data
    • Powershell DSC configurations
    • Lability lab creation behavior (attaching to switches, downloading media, etc)
    • Configuring and starting the lab

  3. Debugging labs that won’t start: a discussion of troubleshooting strategies when things aren’t working correctly.

    • Logging in via Powershell remoting if possible
    • Resetting the VMs so you can log on and see what went wrong
    • DSC logs in Event Viewer
    • Lability logs in C:\Bootstrap
    • Deleting existing VHDs before redeploying a lab when troubleshooting
    • Filtering the error list

  4. Expanding our simple VM example:

    • Lab prefixes
    • Custom resources (install Firefox)
    • DSC modules, version specifiers, and what happens if DSC modules are not defined in the config data (move this from 02-Simple)

  5. Simple private network

    • Add an additional node
    • Explain NodeName = '*'
    • Create an internal network
    • Explain types of switches and what happens if the switch doesn’t already exist

  6. NAT network configuration: two VMs, one with two NICs acting as a NAT gateway, and one with just one NIC behind the NAT.

    • Discuss problems related to two NICs and nondeterministic switch assignment order
    • Discuss double-NAT
    • Show how to connect to the VMs behind NAT via PS remoting if the gateway is up

  7. AD domain behind NAT network: three VMs, one domain controller, one NAT gateway, and one Windows 10 client

    • Discuss ordering of resources in the config file to minimize errors
    • Show example of Windows event forwarding

  8. Back matter (?)

    • Powershell DSC concepts
    • Lability concepts