Finally took the time to migrate Exchange 2003 onto a virtual environment. I used the VMware converter and downloaded the necessary support files to get the physical pc converted to my VMware Server. Afterwards, I cleaned up the harddrive of unnecessary software. Turned off swap file. split the system into 2 disks. one stores the OS. the other stores the NTDS and Exchange data. Toggled the OS virtual disk into performance mode. All seemed to work well. Had to reboot due to an application error. My guess is a memory problem (I did limit the memory and turnned off swap file after all). Seems to work well now. Definitely recommend dedicated harddisk as opposed to virtual disks. I’ve had no success shrinking/defragging/cleanning up a virtual disk after it has encountered many read/writes and have been through snapshots. I had to resort to making a new virtual disk and using a drive imaging software like drivesnapshot to transfer the OS from one disk to another. in the end, the 15 gig vmdk file got trimmed down to 1.5gig. Yeah, I can’t explain why vmware’s disk manager didn’t shrink nor clean the drive. Besides all that, everything is going well. I do not recommend virtualizing Exchange server for those who have more users or have large volumes of emails. I can’t quite provide an exact formula but one should monitor the cpu and disk usage currently experienced on the physical environment and take that into account when running virtualized.

If you’ve wondered how you can get your windows to connect to a VPN server without having to pay Microsoft Terminal Services Licenses then you’re in luck. There is a linux solution called Poptop. I’ve tried Openssh and Openvpn either solution requires installing a windows client and not reusing the existing vpn connectivity interface offered by Windows. I have confirmed this working on Windows 7 connecting to Ubuntu. My Ubuntu is a small virtual machine running off another server costing little overhead. Please note however that the encryption used is not secure enough. Microsoft client supports pptp using 128bit strength which is the point of failure. Not fault of microsoft per se. they support stronger encryption that, at this time, does not exist in a free open source solution that we can use.

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward