Part I: Introduction
Purpose. The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate how and why someone might want to set up a virtualized domain and network to service this domain. Point blank, the purpose of this is to learn how a domain and Active Directory replication work. To simulate two different offices, physically separated from each other, a VPN tunnel is used to ferry traffic back and forth. This tunnel actually is a split-tunnel in the sense that only traffic between the two subnets are actually carried over the tunnel and everything else goes out through the ISP for each location.
Method. Simply put, everything is virtualized using Virtualbox. We have two routers that are running pfSense, two Domain Controllers that are Server 2012 and two clients that are Windows 7. The ISP in this case is my network and none of the tunnel traffic leaves my WAN but internet traffic is routed out to the actual Internet.
What I wanted to learn from this project:
How to set an IPSec tunnel between two routers so the subnets can communicate.
How to join a secondary Domain Controller to a domain for replication and failover.
How to install WSUS and have it push updates to the clients via Group Policy.
How Group Policy works in general.