VM running on XP Cannot See Groups in AD

[AngelC2]

I've created a VM lab domain on our ESX 3.5 environment for testing purposes and our development team created VM's running Windows Server 2003 using Vmware Server (free) on their local XP machines to join this domain. All is fine except that when our developers go into their local Administrators group to add a group from this lab domain...they cannot see these groups...the XP machine is the only object seen when attempting to browse, the machine doesn't see the actual lab domain itself which means they can't see the groups in it.

I'm thinking this has something to do with the fact that I created a separate isolated lab domain that's not part of our production domain or forest tree for that matter...this lab domain is its own forest but the VM's that they are using are running on their local XP machines which are part of our existing production domain.

Can anyone explain if I'm heading in the right direction in my logic regarding this problem, so I can re-configure our lab environment to work together with our existing network?

Any help is much appreciated...thanks in advance :smileycool:

[Lightbulb]

Hmm my guess is going to be network communication between the VMs running on there Workstation Vmware servers (Which I take it were able to join the LAB domain?) and the LAB AD system(s) on the ESX host that make up the lab domain.

Are the VMs on the developers Vmware systems bridged with the workstation adapter? Do they (The VMs) have IPs routable on your network?

The VMs need to be able to reach the AD systems via RPC ports DNS (TCP/UDP) LDAP and hey why not UDP 123 (NTP). I probably forgot something in there but I am sure someone will come along and let me know what that was.

[AngelC2]

Although the question was not answered we provided another solution for a dev/test environment, so this issue is closed.