Intro

Hi there! For some time I’ve been thinking about creating a few posts on starting your own Windows Autopilot small lab. This lab is Hyper-V based so prepare your strongest hardware or dust off your servers and enjoy!

Microsoft 365 tenant

Windows Autopilot is cloud solution which purpose is to bring devices into management state over the Internet.

This requires…🥁🥁…Microsoft 365 tenant with licenses!

THE BEST way to get your own POC/sandbox/place where you can break things is to request Microsoft 365 Developer Program 🙌

Simply, go here and fill-out the from!

You will get Microsoft 365 E5 instant sandbox with:

All this and more for free!

Where is a catch? Such sandbox has renewable expiration period of 90 days.

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How to renew it? You need to create some activity within environment. From my experience it does not have to be anything complicated. I had periods of time when I signed-in to tenant clicked through some stuff once in 3 months and it was sufficient 😁

Windows and Office 365 deployment lab kit

Second part of your sandbox is Hyper-v lab. The labs in the kit cover using Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, Desktop Analytics (which is now deprecated), the Office Customization Tool, OneDrive, Windows Autopilot, and more.

What you get in the kit:

This environment has 90 days evaluation period and more or less after that time Microsoft releases updated version of the kit.

To get your own setup go here.

Summary

Now you have all the tools to create, test, break and learn!

Checkout next part of this series to see how to slightly improve your lab.

See you in next! 😉 🧠