if you set up 2 virtual machines 1 windows server 2003 and 1 windows xp pro can i run them both at the same time and set up a domain on server 2003 and connect to the domain on xp on vmware

It all depends on the hardware that you are running on. You will need some ram for your host operating system, about 512MB for the virtualized server 2003 and about 256MB for the virtualized XP client. Those are minimums but are fine for testing domain connectivity.

If you are using VMWare Workstation you have a lot of options as far as virtual LANs, but even with the free player you can choose host only networking to keep them separate from other physical machines on your network.

Use Virtual PC instead. Microsoft have lots of doucmentation on this and they are free to download images for server 2033 etc...

As someone that has used both Virtual PC and VMWare products I can say that VMWare far outperforms Virtual PC, even when installing Microsoft's own operating systems. I think you are on the right path and will find that VMWare can do what you are looking for, and do it well.

I was just saying that virtual pc has images, better docs about this, and better networking

Thats cool, but Microsoft releases those same images (prebuilt servers for 2003, SQL 2005 and so on) for VMWare to since it is the more popular platform. I don't remember Virtual PC having better networking, but they might have updated it some. I still don't see how they could have surpassed VMWare, but they might be close now. Plus the documentation and support for VMWare is very extensive. Sites, Forums and IRC channels dedicated to all the VMWare products. It just has a much larger userbase.

My last memory of Virtual PC was trying to setup an Exchange Server in a virtual Environment. Forrest Prep took 4 hours. We wiped it out, installed VMWare and recreated the virtual machines. This time Forrest Prep took 15 minutes.

I was just thinking...

Virtial PC has networking options for:

networking between virtual pcs only - a virtual DHCP server is also emulated

networking between the host and virtual machines only

full networking with the host acting as a NAT server essentially

real networking if each VM is allocated a physical NIC.

I dunno , maybe im just biased toward VPC becuase i never had much experience with VMWare (no money)

I was just thinking...

Virtial PC has networking options for:

networking between virtual pcs only - a virtual DHCP server is also emulated

networking between the host and virtual machines only

full networking with the host acting as a NAT server essentially

real networking if each VM is allocated a physical NIC.

I dunno , maybe im just biased toward VPC becuase i never had much experience with VMWare (no money)

sorry for the double post

You should check them out. VMWare Player and VMWare Server are free, as well as VMWare Fusion for the Mac (only while it's in beta though).

VMWare Workstation gives you some more options, and VMWare's VI3 (includes ESX server) is the big boy. Very expensive, but meant for large production environments. What it can do is incredible though.