I'm new to Exchange, and AD Admin as well as to using Powershell for both. That being the case I want to set up an off-network test environment with a copy of our company's DC and Exchange databases to test Powershell commands and such before running them in production.

I have a physical server at my disposal that has more than enough resources to handle the VM's. I know that it's a bad idea to install Exchange and the DC on the same machine in production, but is there any reason why it would be a bad idea in a test environment?

If so, does anyone have a recommendation for how I can setup a suitable, noob-friendly environment without using the VM's in the way I'm thinking?

Thanks.

• Edited by MorlockMike 17 hours 29 minutes ago Typo

If the server is running Windows Server 2012 or 2012R2 then your easiest option might be to simply create two VMs on the physical server. One for the DC and the other for Exchange. Hyper-V licencing on 2012 (and possibly 2008/2008R2) allows you to have two VMs running on the physical host using the hosts licence, so long as the host OS doesn't do anything other than handle Hyper-V (or if you install AD on the host then you just have a single VM in addition that runs Exchange.

I've read comments that it is possible to work around the restriction regarding AD and Exchange, but it seems a lot of hassle, would make it an unsupported configuration, and would also mean you didn't have an accurate representation of how it would work in production. If you're experimenting with PowerShell I think the last part is most important since in a production environment you'll likely need to reference the DC and Exchange server in your commands, and having them local on the same box isn't going to give you a good introduction into how the syntax works, so any scripts you write on there may not work in production.

• Marked as answer by MorlockMike 12 hours 13 minutes ago

That's the direction I was leaning towards. It seemed like the path of least resistance, but I wanted to be sure first. Thanks for the confirmation.