Last night I made some progress in preparing my demo/lab Windows Server 2008 R2 laptop.  I got VMM 2008 R2 installed.  I was thinking of running it in a VM but I figured that would be a waste of RAM.

I also figured out my RRAS approach to connecting VM’s to the parent partition wifi would not work.  Yes, it could work if the router on the physical network had a route to my virtual network’s IP range but that would only work at home – not at hotels or offices where I might be speaking.  Instead I disabled RRAS and bridged the wifi NIC with the NIC representing my internal virtual network.

The internal virtual network connects the parent partition to all VM’s.  The parent gets a new NIC representing the virtual network.  This has no physical connection to the Ethernet or wifi networks.  I then bridged this network with my wifi NIC.  Problem solved.

For the wired NIC I can create another external virtual network.

As a result I can disable DHCP on my parent partition.  The VM’s on my two virtual networks are able to get IP address configurations from the physical network.

My parent partition is a DC for itself so I need to be wary of DNS.  The DC is a DNS.  I made sure to set DNS on the NIC’s to 127.0.0.1.  DNS is configured to forward to OpenDNS.

I got my first template VM set up.  Documentation on the process is to follow later today/tonight.