How about obtaining practical experience with Windows Server
in a hybrid administration context? Well,
because the cloud labs that we have at Pluralsight
in A Cloud Guru are all cloudy,
there's not all that much dealing with Windows Server and Active Directory and
that kind of stuff, so I would instead recommend that you do a certification
practice lab. I mentioned this in the previous module,
so I'm not going to repeat myself, but it involves you setting up a
hypervisor on your desktop or laptop computer,
like a Windows 10 or Windows 11 Hyper‑V situation, and creating very small
virtual machines, they don't need to have more than say 2 GB of RAM
allocated to each one, where you've got a multi‑domain,
multi‑forest environment so that you can practice with replication and
trusts and all of that kind of stuff. And then you can stand up a
site‑to‑site VPN into Azure because you have an Azure free account I'm
trusting, and this really gives you the true hybrid experience. Because
once that IPSec tunnel is up,
you could take virtual machines in Azure and join them
to your local on‑premises domain,
you can extend your on‑premises domain by deploying domain
controllers for it out in the cloud, or you could create
forest trusts across the cloud.
So there's lots of possibilities, particularly if you're an experimental kinesthetic learner.