Resources, which help you to learn MEM and MEMC.
Last time I was asked what is the best idea to start learning the Microsoft Endpoint (Configuration) Manager.
Keep practicing.
But how to practice if you need to spend some money to buy licenses, provide a credit card for Azure subscriptions and deploy Virtual Machines on our hardware.
In my case, I decided to find and buy an old four HP Prodesk / EliteDesk devices which are cheap and can have two disks and up to 32GB of RAM. Now I have 4 physical devices on which I can even deploy a large lab. It’s enough for me. For almost two years I spend a lot of time finding good and cheap RAM, SSD disks, etc…
But what with Cloud? It is not a cheap thing. Especially licenses.
Developer Tenant
So for people like me, like you, for every developer Microsoft created something named Developer Tenant.
It is a tenant, which is automatically renewed after 3 months and has 25! Yes, 25 licenses of Microsoft 365 E5 Without Audio and Windows 10 Enterprise. It is enough for any cases for now.
Using this tenant you can do any lab, you can add your domain, add your’s subscription and do many tests, and provide any blog posts like in my case.
How to create that tenant?
Open the Microsoft 365 Developer Program website and click Join. Use your account and create the first tenant. It will take a while, it is for 3 months, but should be extended for another 3 months before expiring, etc. In my case, one of my tenants exists for almost two years.
You can import a sample pack of users, mail and events, and even Sharepoint sites!
Looks interesting? For me yes – I don’t need to spend money for licenses for my tests and non-production data.
Windows 10 and Office 365 deployment lab kit
The next thing is prepared by Microsoft lab, which you need to provision on your Hyper-V server. It allows you to create a fully functional (and it’s already configured) lab for learning MEM(C) and how they are working on the Hybrid environment.
About this, I already created a post, which you can read it here. The differences between the old post and the new version of the lab are that the new lab contains the MEMC in the 2103 version and Windows 10 in the 21H1 version.
Azure
Yep, it’s not a cheap thing. But you can use Trial Accounts for that cases. You have one month to do all labs and spend 175€ or 200$. Everything that you need to add your credit card AND DO NOT FORGET TO turn off resources AND DELETE IT BEFORE 30 days of expiring your lab!
There are many ways to learn MEM and MEMC. For me, first is most important. It allows you to create a full cloud environment to learn those technologies.