[AD and DNS] Hosting a dev domain on top of a live network?

[SiD the Turtle]

Hi guys,

Odd situation for you. We have a 2003 domain functional level domain here. We also have virtualised (Hyper-V) test domains on their own virtual networks. This means that to use any machine other than the test domain's DC remotely, you need to remote onto the DC and then from there remote to the specific machine.

What we want is a completely separate forest (i.e. minimum changes to the live domain) that's piggybacking on the live network so that people can remote directly onto dev machines.

As I don't want to experiment, what's the best way to make this test domain visible while it's sitting on top of the live network? I guess I need to play with DNS in some fashion.

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Cheers guys, after a bit of Googling I found the answer appropriate to my setup. The best way to look at it was two completely separate networks that need access to each other, for example two companies after a merger.

So to solve the problem I set up a DNS stub for the test domain in live's DNS and vice versa. Apparently conditional forwarding would do the same thing, but it doesn't work for me. The only - understandable - limitation of this setup is that sitting on a client PC in the live domain I have to use the FQDN of the test servers rather than just their server names to RDP, access shares or otherwise connect to them.

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Cheers I'll give that a try, though how can it be smart enough to know which domain to go to? Say I connected to a server named 'Bob', how does it know I want bob.live.com and not bob.test.com?