Active Directory Cookbook

18.13. Using VMWare for Testing AD

Problem

One of the issues that developers and administrators commonly face when trying to do Active Directory testing is the limitation of being able to host only a single domain on a server. You can use VMWare to work around this issue and host multiple domains on a single server.

Solution

VMWare, Inc. (http://www.vmware.com/) develops a very popular virtual machine technology that allows you to run multiple operating systems, even of different varieties, on a single machine. Their VMWare Workstation product can be used on laptops and desktop servers and is great for running simulations. Their VMWare GSX Server is oriented for enterprise solutions so that you could even run production- grade services from VMWare virtual machines.

As far as Active Directory goes, you can create several virtual machines on a single host using either the Workstation or GSX Server products to simulate a forest. I’ve personally used VMWare to help facilitate schema extension testing. Since there is no supported schema deletion process, once you’ve extended the schema, you cannot extend the schema again with the same extensions (if you wanted to test the extension process again). VMWare stores each virtual machine as a collection of files. Once you’ve created a baseline domain controller virtual machine, you can copy the files that make up that virtual machine and create as many domain controllers as needed.

If you support multiple domains in a forest, it can be expensive ...