Am I am rebuilding my lab, I wanted to list out a few utilities that I used. The list is not comprehensive but I am hoping that you may discover a new utility or two to help you as well.
VMware Server – Its free and I have it installed on two servers, those plus my desktop with VMware Workstation give me a nice lab. Total of 9 cores and 20GB of RAM across all three machines.
NewSID – Creates a new sid, helpful when you are cloning Windows boxes and doing want to sysprep them all. I use it in my test lab. I don’t think its supported in production so double check that!
Backinfo – Nope not BGinfo, its a little utility I came across in a Microsoft demo, and finally found it in the Windows Server System Reference Architecture Virtual Environments for Development and Test (WSSRA-VE) Deployment Kit. I like it way more than BGinfo.
Terminals - Terminals is a secure, multi tab terminal services/remote desktop client. It handles RDP, VNC, ICA and many other protocols. Also does connection saves/cloning and group connects.
Vyatta – Linux based router that I use to link all my lab subnets, site and organizations.
I like to make a single VMware machine. Patch it, install the general utilities, set the time zone and other misc setting then power it off. Now I just copy the entire folder, rename it and open it with the VMware server. Leaving the original as a base image. Now run NewSID on the copy because ALL the images will have the same SID. That’ll be a problem on a domain. Rinse and repeat to bring up a many images as you need. I have VMware workstation install on my desktop and I use the clone feature instead of the folder copy, but the process is still the same.
Once I have all the servers up, just input them into terminals and have tabbed RDP access to the whole environment.
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