RDC From A Client VM To A AD DC

RDC From a Client VM To a AD DC

Objective

You will see a method of connecting a Virtual Client Machine to a centralised Active Directory Domain Controller

Outcome

By The End you should be confident in how to set up a simple VM and connect to the domain controller using Remote Desktop Connection.

This is my first project of many. This is a series linked to a program I am making that should in theory help with basic ICT troubleshooting without a physical engineer needing to assist. Why I have linked this to servers will make more sense later. But for now, this is about how a Virtual machine that runs a standard windows OS can use “Remote Desktop Connection” to access the server.

The first thing I needed to do was download a version of VMware. Why did I use VMware? My current Version of Windows 11 Wouldn’t let me use Hyper-V in admin tools, I also didn’t want to use VirtualBox since I was going for more industry standard software’s so VMWare it was 😊.

I found a nice little collection of VMWare Player Pro archives that I used to download VMWare 17.5.2 When I had that downloaded my ISO files for the server and client and then booted them up.

My first step was to Install all the updates on the server and make a snapshot of the fresh install. After this I then started installed Active Directory from the Server Manager

I went through the bootup which asked me various questions about the Domain Controller I was creating. When I was done, I set the network settings inside VMWares VM settings to Bridged so I could use my Physical LAN connection as the VMs LAN connection. I needed my VMS to be on the same network so I could use RDC and remote into the server on the Client VM. I also made sure to tick “Replicate Physical Network Connection”. Once this was done and I tested with an ipconfig that my VMs were using the same Subnet I could then allow for inbound RDC rules. This was also set up on the server, to do this I enabled Remote Desktop.

After this I launched Active Directory users and groups. I already had a user for the server which was the built-in admin but if someone wanted to sign into my server for whatever reason I need to make them an account. So here is my admin account for the server, now all I did was create a new user in active directory.

Viewing the new account, I needed to add the group “Domain Admin” this would be added to the user account I created. Without this I cannot RDC into the server due to access level. If I tried now, I’d get this prompt on my Client VM. Please note that I created a VM Client by making a new Virtual Machine and using a standard Windows ISO. This can be found here. So since I would get this error I added domain Admin and remoted in.

That was all for this instalment. A few things to expect from the future. This Project is made for me to have a test lab environment for AD and play around in the windows servers. My goal here is to make various ICT related projects that would be seen within an on-prem infrastructure environment. A few things I plan to add next are:

Allowing the client machine to attach itself to the server domain, this for me would just be best practise so I can isolate the machines and also, I can manage those machines it’ll also allow to make further instalments about policy, security and automated installation.
Changing the access levels, allowing some VM clients to be admins, others can only view and have the main admin that has full access. This way I can split the access up so not everyone can access everything when remoting into the server.
I also plan to start making a shared drive which in turn I can then connect it to a VM where I plan to save files from the program I was talking about earlier. It’ll all make sense soon enough.