w2k3 testing environment

[gonefishin]

I am trying to setup a w2k3 server and xp client wihin vmware as a testing environment. My host is xp pro. The problem that I have is in establishing communication between the xp client and w2k3 server. I have tried VMnet8 NAT, and VMnet1 host only. At current I have both the xp client and w2k3 server on the VMnet8(192.168.17.0). I have set the w2k3 server to 192.168.17.5 and disabled dhcp on this virtual network. I installed dhcp on the w2k3 server and the xp client is unable to renew an address from the w2k3 server. I created a snapshot before the installation of the dhcp server on the w2k3 server and restored that snapshot. I then renabled the vmware dhcp server and rebooted both virtual machines. I setup a folder share on the virtual xp machine and was able to access it from the w2k3 machine. What am I missing? I want to run dhcp, dns, and ad on the the virtual w2k3 server and connect to the domain from the virtual xp client.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

[RDPetruska · Accepted solution]

What you want is to use a custom network and specify one of the unused VMnet switches (2-7, 9) as the network between your 2003 and XP virtual machines. You can add a 2nd virtual NIC to the 2003 VM and set it to either bridged or NAT, and install routing software... if you want this sub-network to have access to the outside world as well.

[gonefishin]

On setting up routing and remote access, I was prompted with an error message that I needed to disable (Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing). I am not sure how this service was set to start automatically. It was probably one of the updates that I installed in setting up the server. After I disabled it, all things worked as they were supposed to. I used VMnet8 and disabled the VMWare dhcp server and set up my own within w2k3 virtual machine.

Thanks for the reply