Helpful tip on Virtual Machine Configuration using Virtual PC
I'd been racking my brain trying to remember the configuration steps for configuring a Virtual PC -based VM that's running as a Domain Controller (with DNS enabled) to access the internet. I've done this many times in the past and just couldn't remember the steps. This is a tricky thing because with a DC, DNS is also installed, therefore if you run your VM on say...your corporate network, and you have DNS enabled, then the DNS server within your VM could potentially be handing out IPs to DHCP-enabled networked clients. This doesn't make your IT department (most notably, your Network Administrators) happy :-) because whenever you shut down the VM, everyone who had an IP issued by your DNS server can't resolve and thus looses network connectivity :-) I can't count how many times I've seen folks give demos and wound up hosing almost every one of their colleagues in their office because they just hard-wired into the corporae network with VMs running as DCs with DNS enabled :-)
I stumbled across this post, from the UK Dynamics CRM Blog, that provides a nice summary of the steps. Hopefully this will be a good reference in case you get into some configuration scenarios where you need to do this. For those of you doing development or giving demos using a Virtual PC, hopefully this will save you (and your Network Admins) a lot of pain :-)
~ Lamont
