[Samba] Samba4 AD/DC and Virtual Machines?

[Michael A Weber]

> On Aug 9, 2016, at 9:14 PM, Mark Foley via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> 
> Can Samba4 be used for AD/DC with virtual machines? For example, I have a Ubuntu domain member
> and it currently does AD authentication for users.  I would like to run this computer as a VM
> also hosting Windows 7, which I would also like the Windows 7 user(s) to AD authenticate.
> 
> One problem I foresee is joining the computer to the domain. I imagine there is only one IP
> address. If I join the WIN7 VM, I expect I could not use the same computer name as the Ubuntu
> hostname.
> 
> I see other issues with ports, etc.
> 
> Is this doable? Has anyone done this?
> 
> THX --Mark
> 
> 
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Mark—

If I’m understanding you correctly, you want to move your Samba AD/DC to a virtual machine, and you also have a virtual machine with Windows 7 on it, and these will both be on the same virtual host.

If this is correct, then yes, you can definitely do it.  Each virtual machine will have a network adapter and it will, depending upon how you have it configured, get (or have) its own IP address.  For example, I used my Macbook Pro as a virtual machine host and had another Mac OS VM, two CentOS VMs, and a Windows 10 VM, all communicating and bridged to my machine’s adapter, therefore all accessing the rest of my LAN.

If my understanding is correct, you can even setup an additional host-only network and second ethernet adapters in each VM so that network traffic only goes between those two VMs, but that’s not really needed since you still need to get to the Windows 7 VM from outside the host.

If I misunderstood and you’d like to run the Samba VM on a Windows 7 host, AND have users of that host authenticate against the AD, that would be a small problem unless you have the VM autostart and you give it enough time to boot up completely before your users attempt to authenticate.

There are many options, and you can definitely accomplish what you want.

Mike