I've been away from hands-on systems administration for nearly 10 years while running a software company. Now that I've moved on from that business, I have a sysadmin position lined up and want to refresh my skills before starting. The new environment uses Azure, Intune, Microsoft 365, and related services. Is there a genuinely free way to build a practice environment, or would it be better to purchase a single Microsoft 365 business license and create a small home lab?
1 Answer
You may not need to recreate an entire enterprise environment. The important thing is being comfortable learning unfamiliar tools and troubleshooting your way through them. Training platforms and structured courses can help, and a small home lab or cloud sandbox is useful for practicing specific tasks as they come up.
I’m confident I can learn it, but I’d still like to spend some time hands-on. I’ve built environments from very basic setups into full directory services, messaging, virtualization, backup, networking, and application infrastructure before; I just want to get familiar with the modern cloud-based equivalents.