Virtual machines make it easy for us to learn in so many ways. Setting up a home lab can easily be done by installing VMs on a single computer and installing various operating systems, servers and other software in order to upgrade your tech skills. This article assumes you have already installed VMware workstation or Oracle Virtualbox on your Pc. Before I proceed you need to know there are pre-requisites for running a smooth VM. A good CPU and enough Ram can see you through. Okay, now that we have satisfied that requirement, let’s proceed.

First of all, Windows Server 2019 is not entirely free but the good news is that there is an evaluation copy that you can access for free and use for 180 days. You can download the Evaluation copy from this site. I will use Virtualbox to show you how the installation is done.

When you open your Virtualbox, you would be greeted with a similar image like this after you click new on top.

You will need to fill in the name you want to call your server and the version that you are installing. After you do this, you can then click ‘Next’ and you will be greeted with the second Screen. Note, for this example I chose to call it server2019 and chose Windows2019 (64bit)

Now, you must Select that amount of Ram that you want to allocate this server on your VM. Remember I told you initially that Ram is of great importance to VMs.I will recommend you go with 4096mb=4g. After selecting that, click ‘Next’ and then we come to this screen below

After you click ‘Create’, you will see the image below

Click ‘Next’ again and you will get the image below

Select Dynamically allocated and click ‘Next’

You can now select the size of the virtual hard disk that you want to create. After that click ‘Create’ and you will get this screen

As you can see where the red arrow is,server2019 has been created but we are not quite done yet. There are still a few tweaks left before we start using our server.

Next, we need to upload the windows server ISO we downloaded earlier on unto the virtual hard disk in Virtualbox. We can do this by clicking on settings on top and also make sure the server you to want to set up is highlighted in the image below. Watch the red arrows

After clicking ‘settings’,you should get the screen below

You can make any adjustments to the name, type and versions that you want. At this point you can also click on the advanced tab if you want, There you have the option to enable drag and drop, share clipboard etc by selecting the ‘bidirectional’ tab. This option enables you to copy anything from you pc to the VM easily by copying and pasting or dragging and dropping. I will get to this part before this tutorial ends but for now , let’s click on ‘system’.The image below has floppy disk as the first choice in the boot order so we need to change this by highlighting hard disk and click on the top arrow.

After doing that,I also adjusted the Ram I want my server to have,remember I recommended 4gb. The processor tab can also be adjusted to allocate the number of CPUs you want your virtual machine to have. For this one,I am going to choose 2CPUs as seen below

Next, click on storage so that we can upload our ISO.

Now  you get this image below, click on the blue disc the arrow is point to

This would give options to choose, click on ‘choose a disk file ‘ and select the ISO you downloaded earlier. After you upload the ISO, you will see it appear similar to this image

Now let’s select the type of Network we want to use for our server, I will choose Bridged Adapter because I want it on the same network as my Pc and I will also set up a static address on the server later(This would be covered in another article). By doing this the machines on my network will be able to reach this server. After you click Network and choose that and this is what you should see

Now let’s click ok and then ‘start’ like in the image below

After we click on ‘start’, the installation should start as we see in this image.

Click on ‘Next’,select Windows Server 2019 Datacenter Evaluation(Desktop Experience).Datacentre Evaluation License allows us to install unto unlimited VMs

After this make sure you select custom install because we want a clean installation. After that, there will be an option to partition your hard drive, Click ‘New’

After Partition is complete Installation will begin. This will take some time.After setup is done, this screen is what you will see this, Fill in your password

Once you click ‘finish’,you will need to press ctrl+Alt+Delete to unlock the screen. If that doesn’t  work,then right-click the green arrow below and it will give the ctrl+Alt+Delete option,once you click it the screen will unlock

After the screen unlocks, put in your password and that is it.Click ‘yes’ when it asks if you want your pc to be discoverable on this network and you are almost done.

Now let’s click on devices to insert guest additions cd. This will allow you to maximize the screen and will also make drag and drop, shared clipboard to work. Click on devices and select optical drive and select ”remove disk from virtual hard hard drive’.After that click on devices and select ‘insert guest additions cd’.This will give the option to run the file, after you click run, follow the prompts to install. Once it is completed you will be given the option to reboot. Choose reboot.

After rebooting you can maximize the screen. Click Devices again, select drag and drop and select ‘bidirectional’, do the same for shared clipboard and they should now work. This helps you to transfer files easily from host to guest and vice -versa.

                                              Conclusion

Thank you for reading this article. Next article is how to set up a static IP in the Server.

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