Add NICs to Existing Virtual PC
Virtual PC is a fantastic tool to help us build test or experimental environment of Windows Server System.
Suppose now we are building a test environment for Windows Server 2003 and its updates. The purpose is to simulate the company's real network environment and test the Service Pack and other updates.
We setup the workstations, member servers and domain controllers on Virtual PC successfully. The next step is to make the scenario as same as the real life environment. We begin to build the Network Address Translation (NAT) server. At this time, we need 2 NICs on the virtual machine. However, by default after installation, there is only one in this virtual Windows Server 2003 and there is only one real NIC in the host computer.
How can we do that? How can we add another NIC to the Windows Server 2003 virtual machine so that we could simulate the real life NAT environment?
Actually we could finish this work within a minute. First, shut down the virtual machine we need to add NICs to. Then start Virtual PC 2004, click the virtual machine we need to add NICs to. Click “Action”, then click “Settings...”. On the new dialog box, click “Networking”. In the right pane, click the dropbox on the right of “Number of network adapters” and choose the total number of NICs we want in this system. Note, here is to choose the total number of NICs we want in this particular virtual machine, but not to choose the number of NICs we want to add to this particular virtual machine. Then we will need to set the scope of the added NIC(s). “Local only” means the particular virtual NIC could only have network connection with virtual machines on the same host computer. We could see another option is the name of the host NIC (we assumed only one NIC in the host computer), this option means the particular virtual NIC could have network connections with virtual machines on the same host computer, the host computer, and computers connectted to the host computer through the host's NIC. If we're configuring the first virtual NIC on a virtual machine, we also can see another option called “NAT”. It's almost the same meaning as the real life NAT concept. After configuring the virtual NICs, click “OK” to close the dialog box.
We've done. Turn on the particular virtual machine we've just configured, we will see another LAN interface is right there. Then we could do the simulation of the real life environment, for instance, the NAT environment, and continue testing the Service Pack and updates in the simulated environment.
To learn more about Virtual PC 2004, please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc