Hello All, This isn't so much a technical question as it is more of a question in how to go about this the right way. I am attempting to learn the ins and outs of SCOM, I know its basic capabilities and requirements and am in the process of doing the following, with the following hardware- Hardware Machine 1 - Custom PC (i-7 2600K, 16gb of DDR3 1600 ram, 1TB Storage, etc.) Machine 2 - Laptop (i-7 1st Gen, etc.) Goal Budget dictates that at this point I attempt to run VM's in order to create a server off of Machine 1 using Hyper-V (Processor supports it) I am wondering if I should be using Server 2008 or try the New Server 2012RC... More to the point, what is the best way to go about all of this? Ultimately I want to do the following - Run a VM with either Server 2008 or 2012RCRun a Scom Environment in order to facilitate my learning the ins and outs of it to the best of my current hardware limitationsNot be limited to having Scom be my priority (room for expansion/seamless transition later on) Any help/feedback you can give is appreciated.

You will likely to get better help in Operations Manager - General Forum, please post there http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/operationsmanagergeneral/threadsThanks !