To learn a bit more about networking and network administration, I decided to build out a small office network using virtual machines. The network belongs to an imaginary small e-commerce business which has a web server serving their e-commerce website. It also has a sales, hr & finance, and development department.
The network will be divided into two sections. The first section is the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) or Screened subnet. This segment of the network will contain the web server. The second section is the internal network which will contain the various department clients, as well as a DNS, email, and backup server (all contained within a single virtual machine). The network will be designed in such a way that it will be able to support exponential growth.
I will be using VirtualBox and a variety of virtual machine images to build out this network. The Network Diagram looks like this:
The first step in the process of building out this network is to install VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a hypervisor that allows me to run multiple virtual machines all on a single host machine. The installation process for this is quite straightforward, so I’m not going to go into it here. You can download VirtualBox here. Depending on your native Operating System, you can google for the relevant installation instructions if you’re not sure.
