SBS guest on Virtual Server 2005 host?

Am I out of my rabbit-ass mind thinking about deploying a production SBS box 
on VS2005 R2?  The flexibility, test-ability, and disaster recovery 
possibilities are tantilizing to consider.

My primary issue is how to protect the 2003 R2 host. Is there any way to 
deploy a front end ISA server while retaining the SBS ISA functionality?  
Perhaps users could VPN into the bastion ISA box?

-- 
Chris King, DC, MCP

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


You might consider doing this for your own network but I would never do this for a client

-- 
Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]
--------------------------------------
Please do not respond directly to me, but only post in the newsgroup so all can take advantage


  Am I out of my rabbit-ass mind thinking about deploying a production SBS box 
  on VS2005 R2?  The flexibility, test-ability, and disaster recovery 
  possibilities are tantilizing to consider.

  My primary issue is how to protect the 2003 R2 host. Is there any way to 
  deploy a front end ISA server while retaining the SBS ISA functionality?  
  Perhaps users could VPN into the bastion ISA box?

  -- 
  Chris King, DC, MCP
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imagine this

You have a simple NAT router in front of a 2NIC W2003S running as VS host, 
the router is at 192.168.33.1/24. The external NIC of the W2003S box either 
has an IP of 192.168.44.4/24 or possibly doesn't have IP bound to it at all.

SBS runnning in the virtual environment also has two NICs, one bridged to 
each physical NIC. ISA running on the SBS with an external of 
192.168.33.2/24 and an internal of 192.168.16.2/24. You can see that in this 
scenario the .44.y network is a 'dead end', not in use, or maybe doesn't 
exist at all.

BTW: I don't think you're crazy but though I'm sortta keen to do similar 
m'self I'm holding off. To run SBS in a virtual environment you not only 
need the  fast IO (HDD & RAM) that SBS normally needs but also sufficient to 
compensate for running in virtual space and possibly running alongside other 
virtual machines. The best idea would be to minimise the tasks machines 
running in the virtual space are responsile for. ie. SBS Standard would seem 
feasible, adding ISA and SQL servres to the tasks performed in the virtual 
machine _may_ be asking a bit too much.

But when a physical client configures a "static" address of 192.168.33.x 
they bypass ISA and all but the NAT. Also I'm quite sure the VS Server must 
have a NIC with an IP.

But with a VS server with 2 physical NICS, one the SBS virtual external 
network, and another physically isolated as the SBS virtual internal 
network, it works quite well. It also avoids a single NIC bandwidth 
bottleneck.

I've been using this as a virtual lab for some time now, and it works 
well,... for a lab.


These are all good reasons, but performance just isn't one of them. A host 
system configured to provide like kind performance to a VM SBS environment 
just isn't very cost effective. Now if you were going to "host" three or 
four separate companies running their own virtualized SBS environment.... 
hmmm, there's a thought.

-- 
/kj