Network Simulation

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I have been advised by my training provider to build a small 2 or 3 computer network, and use some simulation software to produce the effect of having a much larger network to administer. Anybody know anything about this? for example the software to use? do i need a license? system/network requirements?

I think i may have heard someone mention vmware. is this suitable for what i need? :?: :?: :?:

 

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I believe this would be perfect for what you require, but as I have never yet used it, I'll let some of the rest of the Guys who are VMware "experts" answer this for you, regards cost, licencing, etc.

Hope that helps.

 

Hi All

Sounds good to me.

I always use a Beta version of the VMWARE it's free (I am Scots) and I am happy to give them feed back.

You WILL need to ramp up your RAM 2GB would be good.

 

Ok cheers. At the mo my PC is terrible(2GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM, and a budget EPOX motherboard), I'm guessing this would not be anywhere good enough. I went out yesterday and bought a wireless ADSL modem(My BB should be enabled next week, Hoorah ) routing thingy, and a wireless PCMCIA card for my new tosh laptop, how much of an upgrade do you think i'd need to simulate a network? Do i need to have a server OS?

How does vmware actually "simulate" a bigger network?

 

vmware wont simulate a bigger network
it emulates machines on your machine
so like a machine within a machine (or 6 machines within a machine)
giving you more room to play

what they are talking about is load testing software/simulations, and i dont know of any freely available ones
MS used to do a few with its res kits i believe, but not sure about those anymore

anyone care to jump in on this matter?

 

Oh...I see...So if I was to emulate, say 4 machines on my desktop and another 4 on my laptop, I could in theory play around with an 8 machine workgroup? would i really benefit from that? Would I not need a domain based emulation to make the most of win2ks/xps features?

Has anyone else out there got an emulated network to help them through their 70-210/215? If so what kind of machine are you running?

PS. Sorry for being so slow on the uptake!

PPS. Sorry for all the questions!

 

yes but you would need a pretty hefty system to run 4 systems at once (you can look at the systems myself and trip use in the thread below)

however you can run as many systems as you want, and just power them up as needed, so perhaps at some point have two servers running, to test trusts, and at some point a client and server, to test remote install services and group policy

you dont really need to simulate 'large busy networks' to train
you would need to do that to test product stability and such in large environments, to learn a server and a client usually suffices, with two servers useful for testing server-server type configurations
so yes VMWare would be great for you, but get more ram like sandy said

 

You could use two machines running VMWare to simulate a network of eight machines or so, but as has been already mentioned, they'd have to be pretty much high end systems. You need a fast processor, A minimum of 1 GB or RAM and a large HDD...remember, it has to hold all the os data for several machines.

I run a Dell Dimension 8300 with a 200 GB HDD, 1.25 GB RAM and an Intel P4 2.60 GHz CPU. With that, I can run two domain controllers and two client machines but that's it. The DCs run at 256 MB RAM and the client machines use 128 each. If I set their memory any higher, the host machine only has the resources to start three of the four machines.

Get the beta version if you can as Sandy suggests. The full meal deal is quite expensive. Of course, if you're a student, you might qualify to purchase an educational copy which comes at a discount.

I had to save up for the lab machine and software I use now. Before, I used two underpowered IBM desktops the dual booted into client and server OSes and man did they run slow. I still use the original IBM layer 2 switch I bought when I was in school (a few years ago). Only runs 10 mbp/sec but that's why I got it for cheap.