How to simulate a large network of machines for testing?

Question

Currently, I am writing an application that utilizes WMI to scan all the computers on our Active Directory network.

I'm interested in testing the program against all flavors of Windows machines in a testing environment.

Is there a way to similuate this environment in VMware or something?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You have two options.

1. You probably have it right, with VMWare this is easy, try looking for cloning tools. If you plan on copying and pasting the image, you will get several problems (computer Guids repeated, Network Computer Names repeated, etc)

2. You can also "mock" the WMI response by wrapping the WMI methods that you want to call and implementing an interface, using Rhino Mock or NMock if you are working in .NET (which I assume you are).

Answer 2

VMWare works well and can host many virtual computers on a single physical computer. You can also put the virtual computers on your active directory network.

If your goal is to set up a separate large network for testing that has it's own AD server you can look into Amazon EC2 for testing. The advantage here is once you setup your set of servers, you can turn them on and off as needed and only pay for the time actually used ($0.12 per hour).

http://aws.amazon.com/