Virtual Machine in Windows 7 Server

Question

Can anyone tell me how to set the virual machine(VM) in Windows server 7 and how to deploy the dot net web application in the VM and set up the DNS for the web application.

Will all the admin user of the Windows Server 7 will have access to the Virtual machine that is installed on the server. How can I limit the access to the Virtual machine?

I would really appreciate if anyone provide the thoughts or links to guide this set up.

More Details: We are having commercial website with more than 100K users and we want to duplicate the exact application (with customization) in virtual machine for some set of users, we want to keep the app and data to be more secure which should be accessed by only one admin of the server, not by others. After few months, we will move the application to the diff server. But for time being, we are looking for fast solution. And I want to know the drawbacks of this solutions

Answer 1

You can use different solutions to run the virtual machine on your server. (Oracle's virtual box or a VMware solution for example)

Using most of them is resulting in your virtual machine to appear as a different host on your computer network. Usually there are two basic options: bridged or nat.

If you choose bridged your virtual machine is going to appear on your physical network as there was a new host. If you choose NAT then you are going to have a virtual network with this virtual host. It is like you had a router in your physical network with your virtual machine on the router's LAN.

So if you would like to access easily your application from the outside you should use the bridged option.

In your virtual machine you are going to have a separate user set. So by default you can't use it with your host OS's users.

Using a plus virtualization layer in your infrastructure of couse means some overhead. These days these solutions work very well, and even have hardware support, but still means somewhat overhead because of the plus layer introduced.

If you are interested in the efficiency of the solution you should do some load testing. Be aware of the hardware support of different virtualization solutions. See: HW support for virtualization

This really counts MUCH.

Further, (partly) vmware specific details: VMware - para virtualization (PDF)