Active Directory Lab Part IV: Conclusion

This post is part of a series illustrating how to automate the process of deploying an AD Lab. With the resources produced in part two, you can enable yourself and others to quickly and easily perform the AD Lab installation detailed in part three. Suggested next steps and exercises:

• Edit the All People Settings Group Policy linked to the People OU to map the S drive to \\contoso.com\share for all child users.
• Edit the All Workstations Settings Group Policy linked to the Workstations OU to add settings that adds the All Workstations Local Administrators group to the local Administrators group on all child computer objects.
• Edit the All Servers Settings Group Policy linked to the Servers OU to add settings that adds the All Servers Local Administrators group to the local Administrators group on all child computer objects.

Notes and Caveats

Thanks to Dynamic memory, actual resource consumption may be less than the stated requirement, however, you must have the full amount available to start each virtual machine.

Known Issues

• In the Server oobesystem-synchronous.ps1 script, the New-DfsnRoot command generates an error.

Future Improvements

• Allow the location of the downloaded evaluation ISOs to be specified as a parameter; and when specified, preclude the need to download them.
• Add a resource to the OZO AD Lab release that indicates it’s version; and download and extract a new version only if the same version does not already exist on the disk.

Releases

Release Date	Version	Comments
2026-Sep-28	1.0.0	Initial release.
2025-May-11	0.0.5	Testing release.
2025-Mar-02	0.0.4	Testing release.
2026-Feb-16	0.0.3	Testing release.
2025-Feb-16	0.0.2	Testing release.
2025-Feb-16	0.0.1	Testing release.

---

Part I – Introduction

• Introduction
• Architecture

Part II – Customization

• Customization Prerequisites
• Customize the Installer ISOs

Part III – Installation

• Installation Prerequisites
• Create the Virtual Machines
• Install the VMs

Part IV – Conclusion

• Conclusion

---

Comments and Feedback

Your comments and feedback are welcome. You are also welcome to reach out with my contact form and/or raise an issue in GitHub with any script errors you have encountered.