Entry Level IT Support Home Lab Projects for L1/L2 Engineers

Sign up for the Microsoft 365 Business Standard trial to create your tenant, enable MFA with an authenticator app, and cancel recurring billing for a no-cost setup.

Purchase your domain from GoDaddy and onboard it to the Microsoft 365 admin center to enable professional emails, wait for DNS propagation, verify MX and TXT records, and complete onboarding.

Develop a hybrid environment by linking your on-premise and cloud playgrounds, establish a sync between local AD DS and Microsoft 365, and prepare for module three integration.

Install interact connect on premise Active Directory to establish a sync with Azure Intra ID, enabling a single password across on premise and cloud services.

Onboard a custom UPN suffix in on-premise Active Directory and sync it to Azure intra ID to give users a professional UPN, such as evening tech school store.

Establish an active directory with organizational units, user accounts, and security groups for role based access. Implement hybrid cloud integration with Microsoft 365 and provision a production ready endpoint device.

create an organizational unit named evening tech school in Active Directory and add four child OUs: admission, ed department, hr department, and it department.

Create users in Active Directory by department, set up the UPN and passwords (must change at next logon), then create security groups (admission_team, HR_team, student_team, IT_team) and assign members.

Sync on-premise active directory with cloud using Entra sync and verify in the Office 365 admin center. Assign Microsoft 365 Business Standard licenses to users to enable mail and Teams.

Create a Windows 11 Pro virtual machine in VMware Workstation Pro, named laptop-hr1, using the ISO, set bridged networking, memory to 6 GB, and TPM authentication.

Join Windows 11 laptop to the domain, configure DNS to the Active Directory server, and onboard Harry with Outlook, Teams, and MFA setup.

Learn group policy management by deploying corporate wallpaper using GPU, configuring account lockout policy, setting maximum password as policy, and enabling password complexity.

Deploy wallpaper across an organization using Group Policy Objects in Windows Active Directory. Create and link a GPO, configure desktop wallpaper under user configuration, and troubleshoot with gpupdate and gpresult.

Configure account lockout policy to protect user accounts from brute force by locking after multiple failed logins, using the default domain policy, gpupdate, and domain controller verification.

Implement a 90-day maximum password age and a 12-character password complexity policy on the domain policy, enforcing uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters.

Configure a dedicated file sharing drive for each department, map drives manually and automatically for many users using GPU, enable access-based enumeration, and enable shadow copy to recover deleted files.

Add a new 2 gb ntfs data drive on the domain controller, mount it, create per-department folders, set explicit permissions, and map a network drive to verify access.

Automate network drive mapping with a group policy object by configuring a user drive map, using the IP path 192.168.1.100, and testing via gpupdate.

Enable access-based enumeration on the domain controller to display only files and folders a user can access, ensuring Harry only sees the HR folder.

Enable shadow copy on the drive to create point-in-time snapshots with volume shadow copy service, enabling self-service file recovery of previous versions and reducing helpdesk tickets.

Map department printers by IP, install a domain print server with print management, onboard HP drivers, and automate department-based mapping with GPU logic.

Map a printer directly to a user using the printer's IP address, download the HP universal PCL6 driver, and install via add printer manually.

Learn to set up centralized print management on an Active Directory server, install print services, load HP Universal Printing PCL6 drivers, and map shared printers from the print server.

Map printers for large groups using a group policy object, with item-level targeting by security group to assign admission and HR printers, and verify via gpupdate.

Explore how the IT ticketing system serves as a central hub to log, track, and manage incidents, problems, service requests, and changes with P1–P3 priorities and service level agreements.

Explore how to use a ticketing system and service portal to log, assign, and resolve IT requests from onboarding to offboarding, including shared mailbox access, license management, and AD synchronization.