Virtual Lab Installation For Mac
UW Extension uses the Virtual Lab Infrastructure for Data Science and Applied Computing to create a secure connection between your computer and a virtual Windows desktop in which your program software is installed. This infrastructure uses a non-persistent environment, similar to an in-person computer lab. You will need to install the VMWare Horizon Client to access and use a virtual lab for class assignments and projects that require specialized software applications. The Mac version of this series of documents contains four important sections of information for students.
Jan 24, 2018 Open your web browser Go to Click Install VMware Horizon Client At the Download VMware Horizon Clients, find your operating system and click Go to Downloads. At the Product Downloads screen, click Download. The great advantage of a virtual machine is that your original system is untouched – you can operate or remove a Windows installation without causing any harm to OS X. This how-to will walk you through the process of setting up Windows on your Mac using the free VirtualBox application. Installing or Upgrading Citrix Receiver Applications. The Citrix Receiver is a small piece of software code that after connecting allows you to interact with Virtual Lab.
We're going create a Hyper-V Microsoft virtual lab environment on a Mac with the following configuration as discussed in this previous blog article. We can use the same approach on Linux machine using VMWare workstation / player. Our mini-data center consists of 5 machines. A Windows 2012 Server hosting Active Directory and DNS. The machine also holds/manages the hyper-v environment used to run the rest of the machines. Two Windows 2012 servers to be used as application machines.
One Windows 2012 server used to run SQLServer 2012. One Windows 2012 server used to run the on-prem version of windows service bus. The basic steps are. Install Windows Server 2012 that will be our AD/DNS/Hyper-V host. Hack the VMWare/Fusion/Workstation dhcp.conf file to give this windows server a fixed address. Install and configure Active Directory / DNS and Hyper-V.
Mac Virtual Machine
Install multiple guest machines. Install a guest machine in Hyper-V. Give the machine a sensible host name. Hack the VMWare/Fusion/Workstation dhcp.conf file to give this Hyper-V guest a fixed IP address and to point it at the server first created that has DNS. Add the machine to Active Directory. Add the machine to the pool of managed servers on the base machine's Server Manager console.
(Optional) Activate all the machines. (Optional) Enable remote Computer Management on the virtual machines Sizing Our Virtual Lab. The default minimum size for a windows virtual machine is 30GB.
In our case we have essentially 5 virtual machines including the AD machine for a total of 150GB of disk space as allocated by VMWare Fusion to its VMDK. You can actually allocate less disk space when not using pre-allocated disks because the hypervisors will only grow the virtual disks to the size actually used. I've allocated 110GB and could easily have gotten away with less. The following picture shows how much disk space is actually used before any software is installed on each machine. I actually ended up allocating two drives. One for the Hyper-V/AD/DNS machine and one that is used as disk space for all of the virtual machines hosted in Hyper-V.
I did this because I didn't initially think through how much space I needed for all of the virtual machines. Note that I only allocated 60GB for the Hyper-V machines even though I had 4 30GB machines running on that.
I've over-allocated the disk space knowing that most of the machines will never reach anywhere near 30GB of disk usage. The hyper-v VHDs can not all expand to their maximum sizes because they are sitting on a VMDK smaller than that amount. Disk space usage after main Windows Server 2012 (AD/Hyper-V) and 4 bare Windows Server 2012 core installations Disk space usage after loading SQL Server, SQL Studio, Windows Message Bus and Application Server features into the VMs. I'm not recommending it but one advantage of a two drive setup is that the primary drive won't run out of disk space even if the hyper-v virtual disks grow beyond the 60GB allocated to them. Windows Server 2012 treats non-primary virtual disks as SAN drives. So in this case, I allocated two VMWare VMDK drives to VMWare Fusion. Fusion then made one of those the primary for our main Windows Server 2012 instance and the other a supplemental drive V in the picture.
That Windows Server 2012 instance sees the second drive as a SAN. You have to enable the SAN drive before you are able to use the Windows Server 2012 disk manager to partition, format and mount the drive as a drive letter. Installing Microsoft Server 2012 in VMWare Fusion.
Create a new virtual machine with the appropriate configuration. The quad core MacBooks appear as 8 core machines due to hyperthreading. I allocated 4 cores to the Microsoft Server 2012 virtual machine because it will need to then divy those cores out to it's Hyper-V managed virtual machines. Use NAT networking and allocate enough memory. I allocated the Fusion 4 maximum 8GB of memory because Hyper-V will also divy that up among the virtual machines it is managing. 4 cores. NAT Networking.
8GB memory. Enough disk space for all the virtual machines needs.
We discussed non-preallocated 150GB above. I allocated 110GB across two drives.
You can use one drive and size appropriately based on your needs. Boot the virtual machine and install Microsoft Server 2012 in VMWare Fusion You should have a running standalone Windows Server 2012 VM running in Fusion after the installation.
It will not have AD, DNS or Hyper-V enabled. You will be asked to pick an administrator password. I re-use this password here for all the VMs I created later to simplify managing this cluster.
Capture the network device MAC address Fusion gave your new server. You will need it later. Virtual Machine - Network Adapter - Network Adapter Settings We will use this to reconfigure the VMWare Fusion DHCP server later.
Microsoft Virtual Labs
Note I found that the MAC address on this adapter wasn't as useful as I thought. Capture the network device MAC address for the Virtual switch in the Microsoft Server 2012 instance.
We will use this to configure the VMWare Fusion DHCP server later. Type ipconfig in a powershell window and look at the line labeled Physical Address. or. Server Manager - Local Servers - click on vEthernet. You should see the Server 2012 Network Connects.
Double click on the vEthernet (Intel(R) PRO 1000 MT) Network Connection - Virtual Switch. Double click on Details. Record the MAC address under Physical Address. We would use 00-50-56-21-B8-6A in the screen shot below. Fusion must be restarted for any dhcpd.conf changes to take affect. We want all of our machines to used fixed IP addresses and are going to use the dhcpd.conf file to make this happen. I used this tutorial as a reference We don't know all the MAC addresses for all of the servers so we're going to have to do this in phases.
The Windows server hosting Hyper-V will end up with two IP addresses, one for the ethernet adapter created by Fusion and one for the Virtual Switch created inside Microsoft Windows. We recorded those above when we installed the server. Edit the VMWare vmnet8 dhcpd.conf file with an elevated privilege account. MAC: This is located in /Library/Preferences/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf.
PC: notes to be added later. Linux: notes to be added later. Add sections at the bottom for both the MAC assigned by Fusion and the VNET adapter assigned by windows.
Choose addresses outside of the range shown in the subnet range attribute. That range is the list of addresses the VMWare dhcp server dynamically allocates. I believe the domain-name field is actually ignored. I left it in to remind me of the AD domain I intend to use. Start Fusion and this virtual machine.
Verify the vEthernet Virtual switch has the IP address you assigned to it's MAC address. Use the Server Manager to Add Roles and Features via the Manage menu item. Add Active Directory Domain Services (with DNS) and Hyper-V features. Promote this machine to be the Active Directory. I did this a stand alone lab so I made a New Forest. For my example, I picked virtdev.freemansoft.com. I recommend that you pick some subdomain of your domain.
Some examples use.local which can be confusing when using Apple Bonjour which also uses.local. Make sure DNS is enabled as you go through the wizard. This machine will provide DNS to all the Hyper-V guests. The machine may restart one or more times. You should see Administrator as the user id at the password prompt the next time you log in. Hyper-V Virtual Switch.
The simplest thing to do is to download the server installation iso to the windows server hard drive (virtual drive). That will make it visible to Hyper-V guest machines as installation media. You can also use a physical DVD but I haven't done that.
We're going to do a Server Core install. Useful information can be found here. Run the Hyper-V manager with Tools-Hyper-V Manager menu in the Windows 2012 Server Manager. Select Action-New-Virtual Machine. in the Hyper-V Manager. Use the Wizard. Connect to the VM remotely from the Hyper-V Manager. If you did a core installation then you will get a powershell prompt.
Virtual Lab Installation For Mac Download
Join the domain with netdom join /Domain:. My command was netdom join WIN-ADJKS /Domain:virtdev.freemansoft.com. The command should return without errors. Restart the Hyper-V guest machine to pick up the domain name change. Open a console to the VM windows server OS using the Hyper-V manager. Change the name of the computer from the auto-generated name to something meaningful like AppServer1 or SQLServer1.
Use netdom renamecomputer. Open the Server Manager on the main (AD/DNS/Hyper-V) windows server. (You only have one place to do this if you did core installs for the Hyper-V hosted VMs). Select All Servers. It will initially just have your Windows Server 2012 host machine.
Select Manage - Add Servers. Click the Find Button. It will show all the servers in your AD domain.