Windows 7 / Networking

Creating a Domain

A domain includes a server running Active Directory Domain Services. The domain controller could be running Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003, but it's more likely you'll be working with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 servers in your domain today. For the virtual network created in this tutorial, you'll use Windows Server 2008.

You can download a trial edition of Windows Server 2008 from Microsoft's download site (www.Microsoft.com/downloads) by searching on "Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Eval." You need to download the x86-based version (32-bit).

Note Windows Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual PC do not support x64-based operating systems You can run VPC on a 64-bit host, but you can only add x86-based operating systems as virtual machines to VPC.

Before starting Installing Windows Server 2008 on vPC, you should have accomplished the following steps on your Windows 7 system:

  • Install Windows Virtual PC on the system.
  • Create a VPC machine named DC1 with at least 512 MB of RAM (1536 MB if possible), networking deselected, and a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk. Exercise 1.7 can be used as a guide. Note that this step doesn't install Windows Server 2008 but only creates the VPC.
  • Obtain an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition. An .iso image can be downloaded from www.Microsoft.com/downloads and burned to a DVD.
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