Exchange 2013 cluster - From the Ground Up - Series Intro

Hello Everyone,
Its been a while since my last post, but I was busy with holidays and then working on a fairly demanding customer project; a Novell to Microsoft migration - directory, file and even email...more about that some other time.

What I want to do is a series of posts about building up an Exchange 2013 cluster from the ground up.  It will consist of the following:

• Main Site - 2 Mailbox server and 2 CAS servers.
• Remote site - 1 (Mailbox + CAS) server.
• 1 or 2 DAG's.

Since this isn't my production environment and I actually have a full registered test domain, I can use much lower hardware (in my case virtual) specifications than a "real" environment would, but this is meant as a learning exercise as an Exchange consultant (among other things).  NOTE: this is not meant to be a full description of how 2013 works, but obviously certain parts and changes will be touched on.

NEXT: Go over hardware specs and build servers...