Only Two Weeks Left

I'm just getting started experimenting with virtual machines. I'd like to virtualize several production servers onto one high powered box. I believe this will solve a lot of server room space problems. Especially when some of the servers never average above about 10% CPU use. It has always perturbed me that so many vendors require standalone servers for some of there programs when they just do minor operations, such as specialized print servering for a transcription product.

I currently run w2k server in a vm acting as a lan router (RRAS). I then sit in my hotel room, as I am doing now, and assign manual private ip addresses to my host OS (XP PRo) nic and the internal virtual nic on the W2K vm. I set the external virtual nic to be assigned dynamically from the hotels router. I then run a netsh script on the dynamically assigned interface and capture the ip address, subnet mask, gateway and DNS info off the virtual nic. The script then computes the entire range of host ips for the subnet and statically assigns them to the once dynamic virtual nic.

IP addresses get released on a remarkably frequent basis in hotels. I've seen some hotel routers that have lease periods of 6 hours. IP addresses that are released back to the DHCP pool become the property of the external nic on my vm. DHCP on the hotel router will lease them out from the pool but users will receive a notification that there is a conflict using that IP address on the network.

The mac address is virtual along with the nic. NAT-ting behind the vm I can then stand up additional vm's on my own private hotel network. Cool.

Frustration is the mother of invention.

Absolutely - yes! I do this all the time when I am evaluating and testing our products. I think that you will find you have a lot of flexibility with virtual networks to create your own networked environment. One trick I like to use to avoid domain conflicts is create a virtual network on a private IP range on a 'local only' network adaptor for all of the computers in the domain. (A domain sandbox if you will) I then add another virtual network card to an image running ISA Server that gets an address from the corporate network so the the computers can still communicate on the Internet. Neat?

I have a mixture of 13 PC's, (laptop/Deskop) that I use to build networks at home to better understand. I am interesed in seeing if I can have one or two beefed up PCs that can simulate a network in a virtualization world and take the different settings that I would normally do on a phyisical box and it respond the same way...for instance an active directory that has DNS, Wins, DHCP, Exchange, Client simulated boxes that actually simulate the real enviroment...