How to set up a domain environment in Hyper-V

This weekend, I deleted Windows Vista and installed Windows Server 2008 x64 on my home machine for using Hyper-V. My experience is that the performance of Hyper-V is greater than VMware Workstation. I also set up a domain, mail server, gateway and DHCP server on the Hyper-V. This is my first time creating such pretty complex a network environment, so spent may time on it. I wrote down my set up experiences for you who hope to use Hyper-V. Before you reading the following contents, I guess you have basic understanding of Hyper-V.

Configure virtual network

• Create an external virtual network used by guest machines to access Internet.
• Create an internal virtual network used by guest machines to communicate with host.
• Create a private virtual network used by guest machines to communicate with each other.

Install guest operating system

1. Install a Windows Server in the Hyper-V. The hard disk of the server will be shared by all other new virtual machines by using differencing hard disk.
2. Install a Windows Server in the Hyper-V. The server will be used as Domain Controller, Mail Server, DHCP Server and Gateway.
   1. The domain name only needs to contain one dot, for example, home.com.
   2. Network
      1. Use static IP address on the private network adapter.
      2. The DNS will be installed automatically with domain controller.
      3. Set up the NAT service, the NAT service is used as a gateway for sharing Internet connection.
      4. The outer-network is external network and in-network is private network.
      5. The IP scope of external, internal and private networks should be different.
      6. The server’s IP address should be in the private IP scope.
   3. Mail service
      1. The mail domain name should be same as your domain name, so the main service can create the relationship with your domain automatically.
      2. After the creation, you need to use "Authorize" menu to create the relationship between mail service and your domain.
   4. Use "Manager Your Server" to create these services.
3. Install other virtual machines.

Note: If your virtual machines use differencing hard disk and share same parent hard disk, the SIDs of the virtual machines’ are equal, you need to use NewSID.exe tool to change the SIDs. If your guest machine is Windows 2008, you can use SYSPREP.exe.