As part of a project I am working on for my internship with MITRE I was tasked with building a Domain containing a Server 2003 Domain Controller, exchange 2007 Server, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services (MOSS) 2007 Server, and SQL Server 2005. Each service was installed in a server 2003 virtual machine and configured several months ago. The Domain Controller virtual machine was having some issues yesterday so it was wiped and a new Domain Controller was set up. All of the virtual machines were able to rejoin the domain without problem. However when the Exchange server had a number of quirks. The virtual machine hung for about 20 minutes on “applying security policy” during start up and was having a host of authentication issues that prevented outlook web access (owa) from working properly. Since the exchange server was part of a testbed environment the easiest solution was to build a new exchange virtual machine. The moral of the story is that exchange is extremely reliant on the domain controller and very sensitive to its configuration. Since the environment is entirely virtual there should have been more backup copies and snapshots of the virtual machines to revert to, both are good practices that will be applied in the future.

Computer Virtual Machine Windows