 |
 | Home | Contact Us | FAQ | Search & Site Map | Link to Us |
 | Sign In | Join | Other 45 Sites in Network |
Windows Server Forum / Virtual Server / October 2008Setting up a VS network
Hi I am having problems trying to configure a Virtual Server set up. I think what I am trying to do is quite unusal but i'm sure it should be possible. I have a demo laptop running Vista Business and have loaded virtual server. I have created a virtual network called DemoNet and attached the physical network card to this. I have configured the server 2k3 as a domain controler called DemoDomain and would like to now connect a client to this domain all on the laptop. I tryed to add the laptop that I am useing to the DemoDomain however it could not find the DNS server even after I created alternative DNS setting pointing straight at it. I then started thinking that what I need is a new Local Area Network connection on the laptop that is set up on DemoNet. However I can't find a way of doing this through Vista. Anyone got any ideas? Ok so I have made some progress with this, what I needed was a loop back adapter configured on the host machine and to create a virtual network with that. This has got my V server, V Xp and the host vista enviroments all talking to each other with out a network cable attached. Next problem that I am having differculty with is that I can no longer get either virtual machine to ping the default gateway properly. I have added 2 network adapters on both the V xp and the V server box one based on the loopback adapter of the hostmachine the other connecting directly to the phisical network card of the host machine. But not getting through to the internet at all maybe it's something to do with ordering which adapter to try first or something.... anyone got any ideas>? > Ok so I have made some progress with this, what I needed was a loop back > adapter configured on the host machine and to create a virtual network [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > anyone got any ideas>? This is a pretty common problem when people have never used a network until they set up a virtual network. What you are seeing is normal behavior. Setting up a domain and giving it Internet access is not straight-forward. 1. You should not run a domain controller on the same network as the physical NIC. If you plug you laptop into a network to do a demo, that network will see your DC and could cause havoc. You should not use your DC as an Internet router (unless you are running SBS server). 2. With Active Directory, the client machines (and the DC itself) should only point to the local DNS server. No other DNS server has the necessary SRV records to find AD resources. If you have Internet access, you need to set up this DNS server to forward to a public DNS service to resolve foreign URLs. 3. The AD machines on the loopback network should be in their own IP subnet. To use the Internet they need a NAT router to share the host's Internet connection. If your laptop is running a client OS like Vista, the only built-in option is ICS, and this does not work well with AD. You might need third party NAT software. The setup would look like this. Internet | public IP for Internet connection host machine NAT private IP on loopback adapter 192.168.21.254 dg blank | DC 192.168.21.1 dg 192.168.21.254 | workstation(s) 192.168.21.x dg 192.168.21.254 dns 192.168.21.1 4. The best solution is to run a NAT router in a vm, but it requires enough memory to run another vm and also you need to know how to set up NAT software in RRAS (or Linux). I run my AD setup on a virtual network with no connection to the host or the physical network. This connects to the physical network through a vm running Server 2003 as a NAT router. the setup looks like this. Physical LAN (and thence to Internet) | ______________________________ | | 10.1.1.99 dg 10.1.1.1 host and physical machines RRAS/NAT 10.1.1.x dg 10.1.1.1 192.168.21.254 dg blank | DC 192.168.21.1 dg 192.168.21.254 | clients 192.168.21.x dg 192.168.21.254 DNS 192.168.21.1 Hi Bill, many thanks for the reply. Has taken a little while to sink in But I think I see what you are getting at now. I am going to set up another VM to act as the RAS server, dosn't really matter about the ram as I will only need to launch it when I want to connect to the outside world. I am just setting up the new VM now and am wondering if I will be able to remote desktop to the machines that are on the loop back adapter? > Hi Bill, many thanks for the reply. Has taken a little while to sink in > But [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > I am just setting up the new VM now and am wondering if I will be able to > remote desktop to the machines that are on the loop back adapter? If you are using a vm as the router, I would put the other vms in a private virtual network rather than the loopback network. You do not really need a connection the the host machine. You only really need the loopback adapter if you are using the host as the router. >> Hi Bill, many thanks for the reply. Has taken a little while to sink in >> But [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > You only really need the loopback adapter if you are using the host as >the router. If one wants to access the guests via RDP from the host, how can one set it up then? Without the loopback and with the guests in private there is no connectivity from the host to the guests... AFAIK you need network connectivity between the host and the guests to do RDP and if you put them into private then you need some method to get into that network from the host. Would it be possible to use the RRAS router (in the VM) to handle VPN tunneling from the outside world into the private network and then use RDP to the guests?  SignatureBo Berglund (Sweden) >>> Hi Bill, many thanks for the reply. Has taken a little while to sink in >>> But [quoted text clipped - 28 lines] > tunneling from the outside world into the private network and then use > RDP to the guests? It is certainly true that you need an IP connection from the host to the guests if you want to use RDP from the host. I don't do that from the host. I have always run the host as a "powerplant" to run virtual machines, whether in Virtual Server or now with Hyper-V. It is not part of the logical network. I control the server from a Vista workstation on the LAN, not from the host. The host is a headless server that just sits there and runs vms. You could certainly use VPN to connect to the private LAN behind the NAT router if you wanted that option. A virtual network is really no different from a physical one. The networking software doesn't even know which it is running on. One of the first virtual networks I set up was to emulate a site-to-site VPN link. It connected two sites running under VPC on two workstations. Each site had a client machine and a RRAS router. >>>> Hi Bill, many thanks for the reply. Has taken a little while to sink in >>>> But [quoted text clipped - 38 lines] > I control the server from a Vista workstation on the LAN, not from the >host. The host is a headless server that just sits there and runs vms. To me this is tyhe same thing, the PC from which you RDP into the guests must be able to reach them and so the virtual network cannot be completely isolated from the outside network where your own PC resides. > You could certainly use VPN to connect to the private LAN behind the NAT >router if you wanted that option. A virtual network is really no different >from a physical one. The networking software doesn't even know which it is >running on. One of the first virtual networks I set up was to emulate a >site-to-site VPN link. It connected two sites running under VPC on two >workstations. Each site had a client machine and a RRAS router. My point for asking is that the OP wanted to RDP into the guests and if the guests were on private network that network must be accessible from outside. This could be done with RRAS on a single guest with two NIC:s, one in the private network and the other on the outside network. RRAS because it must be capable of establishing a VPN tunnel since the connection is from outside. NAT won't do, but is enough for the VM:s to reach the Internet. I guess that one could also skip the VPN step and just set up a simple routing scheme, but then I think the guest running RRAS must be set as the default gateway on the "outside" PC:s, which probably is not very good.... I have been running a VS2005 guest with Win2003 as a RRAS router since about 2 years in order to handle my own VPN access from the Internet into my home LAN via the ADSL router. Before that I hade a physical Win2000 server doing the same thing for many years. My VS2005 host is XP-Pro SP2. The virtualized solution works as good as the physical one except for recurring problems of getting the guest to start up automatically after power outages. Virtualization saves me one PC and therefore also the energy for that. :-) SignatureBo Berglund (Sweden) |
Reply to this Message |
 Sign In
 Join
 My Latest Posts My Monitored Threads My Blog My Photo Gallery My Profile My Homepage Start New Thread Enable EMail Alerts Rate this Thread
|
©2009 Advenet LLC Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
This website includes both content owned or controlled by Advenet as well as content owned or controlled by third parties.