Building a Virtual Active Directory Test Lab

Windows Server Core, Windows 10 Pro, and macOS Big Sur in an AD domain.

It has been a long time since I build a Microsoft Active Directory lab environment. Years ago, I put together a test lab with physical white box machines that I built. The popularity of virtual machine technology makes all of that space hogging, wires everywhere, make your wife annoyed mess a thing of the past.

This will be the first in a series of posts about how I setup a virtual test lab using VMware Fusion on my Mac.

Microsoft Insider Programs

I have been dabbling with virtual Ubuntu machines over the last year or so, and I wanted to do something a little different. Microsoft offers IT pros a few of their products free of charge, for non-production use, of course, for training and development purposes as part of the Insider program. IT types who want to play along will be interested in the Windows 10, Windows Server (Core), Visual Studio Preview, and SQL Server Developer. There are also programs for Microsoft Edge and Office 365, if you are so inclined.

Make Up of the Lab

I’m looking for a playground so my requirements are pretty low. To build my virtual lab environment I will be using my everyday use 2015 5K iMac with a 3.3Ghz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 CPU and 32GB of RAM. Faster CPUs and more RAM is always better, however, in 2015 my needs were different. I am also running VMware Fusion Pro 12 as the hypervisor on my iMac. Due to the physical constrains of my iMac, not all of these virtual machines will be running all the time. Likewise, they will not be optimized for speed.

As a side note, anyone purchasing a new M1 Apple Silicon powered Macintosh – the 2020 MacBook Air, the 2020 2-port USB-C 13-inch MacBook Pro, or the 2020 silver Mac mini – will not currently be able to run virtualization technology like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop because these apps haven’t yet been updated to work on M1 and Apple’s new virtualization technology layer.

For my initial lab setup, I plan on deploying the Insider editions of Windows Server Core, Windows 10 Pro, and then building an Active Directory domain to manage the environment. Then, I added a virtualized macOS 11 Big Sur VM. In the future, I plan to deploy an IIS web server on my domain controller and the developer edition of SQL Server on another AD member Core server. I will be using Microsoft’s RD Client for macOS to connect to the Windows machines. To network the virtual machines together, I will use the “Share with my Mac” VMware Fusion networking option. From my home network perspective, there will only be one DHCP¹ IP network address being used (by my iMac) and each VM will get it’s own private IP address thanks to the magic of NAT².

For my next article in this series, I will discuss the setup process for Windows Server Core.

Whoever expected that in 2020 webcams, like the ones made by Logitech, would be in tight supply? Thanks to the COVID-19 global pandemic forcing many people to work and learn from home; good webcams are hard to find. It doesn’t help that the webcams in our laptops have varying degrees of quality.

That’s where DroidCam by Dev47Apps comes in. It’s simple, really. Your iPhone has a way better camera system than any webcam that has been shoved into the lid of a MacBook or Windows PC laptop. With so much of our work, learning, and socializing happening via web conference, there are many reasons why you will want to look your best on camera.

DroidCam has two pieces: the main app that runs on your iOS or Android smartphone and a client app that presents the camera feed to your Windows PC. Unfortunately, there is no Mac client app. The app is free to use, with ads and watermarks. In my testing of the free app running on my iPhone XR with the latest version of iOS 13, I did not see any ads or watermarks in the video. For $4.99, you can remove the ads, watermark, and unlock “Pro” features like HD Video and video controls, using your smartphone as a mic, image flipping and rotation, brightness settings, screen captures, and a few other tools.

There are three ways to connect DroidCam to the client app on your Windows PC. The first is to connect both the smartphone and the PC to the same Wi-Fi network. Since I was using my solution for work, I didn’t want to use a public Wi-Fi connection for my video calls. The next option is to create a private Wi-Fi network between the smartphone and the PC. While better than a public Wi-Fi connection, this option seems like too much of a hassle. The third option, I feel, is the best option: using your smartphone’s sync cable to connect the phone to the PC. In my case, that was an Apple Lightning to USB-A cable. Wires, in 2020? I know, it seems crazy, but there are good reasons. First, running your smartphone as a webcam is going to place a heavy load on the phone’s battery. Keeping your smartphone plugged into your PC is going to help keep the battery up. Secondly, there are less changes of weird problems cropping up when Wi-Fi is out of the mix.

There are few things that I didn’t like. There doesn’t seem to be a way to engage the front facing TrueDepth camera on my iPhone XR. DroidCam only seemed to be able to control the rear facing 12MP camera. This situation is understandable given that Dev47Apps originally developed the app for the Android platform. This does mean, however, that the iPhone screen is always pointing away from me. This makes interacting with the iPhone during setup difficult when it’s mounted in a c-clamp on a tripod. To be fair, my tripod rig is not the developer’s fault.

Unlocked DroidCam client HD Mode options

After attending a few work conference calls using DroidCam, I happily paid the full price to unlock the pro features. Paying $4.99 rather than spending hours trying to find a good webcam that is actually in stock on Amazon, eBay, Best Buy or others is a much better use of your time and attention. With its low cost, DroidCam is a very economical solution for getting better video performance out of the equipment you already have.