Greetings.

I'd like to set up a lab to work on while going through the Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration book. I don't think VMware Workstation 10 on my laptop (16 GB RAM, i7 proc) will really work too well and my work environment can't accommodate another domain at the moment.

Any recommendations for a cloud/hosted solution? Rackspace or CloudShare or someone else to host a few servers for a couple of months?

Thanks,
Jeff

My laptop has similar specs to yours and it works just fine for a lab. You could easily get away with using VMs for your DC, SQL, and SharePoint 2013. Here's an example of what my lab looks like. This is in no way reflective of what a production environment should look like, so my suggestion here is only for use as a lab or dev environment.

Domain Controller - 1 CPU, 1GB of ram, 20GB hard disk, Windows Server 2012R2 OS

SQL Server - 1 CPU, 4GB of ram, 40GB hard disk, Windows Server 2012 R2 OS, SQL Server 2012 software

SharePoint App Server - 2 CPUs, 4GB of ram, 40GB hard disk, Windows Server 2012 R2 OS, SharePoint 2013 software

Any additional App servers, web front ends, search servers, workflow servers, office web app servers etc. follow the same specs as the App server.