Vista - Hosting Virtual PC 2007 vm's on a Server 2003 enterprise host

I have a Windows Server 2003 enterprise edition, trial, and on it I installed
Virtual PC, with two XP Pro VM's. (I'm teaching an exchange 2003 class at a
local tech college). I'm running the host as a domain controller, dns, and
exchange server.

What I wanted to do was connect both vm's to the host's domain, and test
exchange with outlook on one of the vm's. I can't get the vm's connected to
the domain though. The vm's can ping the host, but not vice versa, and when
trying to connect them to the domain I get a DNS server not available error.
I have everything set up with static ips; originally I thought it was a DNS
problem, but it worked fine when I used two XP boxes I have in my lab.

The computer's we're using in the lab are dells, 2 gig ram, decent
processors, broadcom nics.

The vm's and host are on the same subnet. I've tried all the different
virtual pc settings possible. This worked fine on a Windows Server 2003 std
edition. Has anyone else come across this, and either discovered you can't
use virtual pc with 2003 enterprise, or found a fix?

Thanks for the help.

On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:48:07 -0700, dbere
<dbere@newsgroup> wrote:
Is the domain controller the DNS provider?
Do you have NIC teaming or TCP offloading enabled on the broadcoms?
Have you updated to the latest drivers? Broadcom NICs can be
notorious with VMs.
Have you checked the firewall on the XP VMs? By default this will
prevent pings.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/
http://smudj.wordpress.com/

Thanks for the reply,

The domain controller does provide the dns, and all firewalls are off. One
of the first things I tried, I'm not sure what the fact that I can only ping
one way means.

"Steve Jain [MVP]" wrote:

On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:39:01 -0700, dbere
<dbere@newsgroup> wrote:
Have you selected the host NIC or Shared Networking for the VMs
network options?

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/
http://smudj.wordpress.com/

I tried both, neither works. There are two other settings, local and
something I can't think of at the moment, that didn't do the trick either.
Host NIC works for the std edition.

Thanks again

On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:37:01 -0700, dbere
<dbere@newsgroup> wrote:
<>
If you want to connect the guests to the host domain controller then
the only two possible networking options are to use the host NIC or
Local Only. Windows networking does not allow NAT or ICS for
networking if you want to attach a PC to an AD domain.

If you go the Local Only way then you need to set up the host with a
Loopback adapter sitting on the same network as the guests, I think.

But back to your connectivity issues:
If you have a situation where the guests can ping (and get response
from) the host and you are not using NAT or ICS, then you actually
have a working connection. If it works one way it works the other way.
TCP/IP is not unidirectional...

So the failure for the ping towards the guests would come down to HOW
you ping:

ping <guest ip address)?
or
ping <guest computer name>?

The second ping requires a working DNS system that can resolve the
computer name and I doubt very much that you have that. It will not
come on by default...
So please first test the ping by IP address and report back.

If that was what you did then the next possibility is packet filtering
on the guest and firewalls. Out of the box new Windows operating
systems always refuse to reply to ping so it has to be enabled in
Windows. Where depends on how it is blocked, firewall is one place and
advanced network interface options another.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)