Last night I made some progress in preparing my demo/lab Windows Server 2008 R2 laptop. I got VMM 2008 R2 installed. I was thinking of running it in a VM but I figured that would be a waste of RAM.
I also figured out my RRAS approach to connecting VM’s to the parent partition wifi would not work. Yes, it could work if the router on the physical network had a route to my virtual network’s IP range but that would only work at home – not at hotels or offices where I might be speaking. Instead I disabled RRAS and bridged the wifi NIC with the NIC representing my internal virtual network.
The internal virtual network connects the parent partition to all VM’s. The parent gets a new NIC representing the virtual network. This has no physical connection to the Ethernet or wifi networks. I then bridged this network with my wifi NIC. Problem solved.
For the wired NIC I can create another external virtual network.
As a result I can disable DHCP on my parent partition. The VM’s on my two virtual networks are able to get IP address configurations from the physical network.
My parent partition is a DC for itself so I need to be wary of DNS. The DC is a DNS. I made sure to set DNS on the NIC’s to 127.0.0.1. DNS is configured to forward to OpenDNS.
I got my first template VM set up. Documentation on the process is to follow later today/tonight.