Virtual Server 2005

[quinla01]

Howdi all, any advice on this one would be great. My current environment is several workstations that connect to a router that also acts as a DNS server and a DHCP server. I would like to set up a test environment using virtual server 2005 (VS).

My priority whilst running the virtual environment is that no other computers outside the virtual environment (ie real work computers) are affected.

I would like to set up two virtual PC's running windows 2003. I would like to have one running as a DNS and DHCP server. The other is a standard 2003 server, nothing special.

The problem i have is that when i first creat the Virtual servers they pick up the the settings from the router which assisns them an IP and configures DNS for them.

So far i can think of two options, neither of which are any good. Option 1: turn off DHCP and DNS on the router, however as stated earlier i do not want it to affect real world computers which this option will do. Option 2: remove the two virtual pc's to a virtual network, this method completly separates the virtual pc's from the reals world pc's. Unfortunatley however, they can no longer see the internet which is essential to run the DNS Server.

Humm, how you no what i mean. Like i say, any help or advice would be great.

Thanks

Andy

[cluberti]

You must put your virtual machines on a virtual network within VS. However, you can set up the loopback adapter on the real server, and use ICS to share that connection with your virtual network in VS (there are technet articles on how to do this). I find the following article to be much easier to follow, however:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archi.../04/477195.aspx

[quinla01]

Hi, thanks for the reply. Unofortunatly the loopback adapter still assigns the virtual machines DHCP and picks up the DNS from the router.

Any more suggestions??

Thanks

[cluberti]

Hard-code your DNS entries on your VM's, and that way you could set the DNS information you need without getting the data from the router (which ICS does pass along, unfortunately in this case). You might want your internal gateway server to use the DNS server or servers that the router passed out as forwarders, however.