Now that the web server is isolated in the DMZ and serving a website, it’s time to build out the internal office network. In a real world scenario, basically all of the employees would be using Windows. However, a Windows virtual machine (VM) is extremely resource hungry and I just don’t have the resources to run multiple Windows machines concurrently on my host. So for this project, I’m going to use one Windows 11 VM, and make the rest Xubuntu Linux machines to save on resources. I don’t want to make all of the clients Linux either, because I want to demonstrate how to setup networking functions on multiple operating systems.
So I’ll go ahead and set up a Windows 11 VM. The first thing I need to do is download the Windows 11 virtual machine image from Microsoft:
I’ll choose VirtualBox because that’s the hypervisor software I’m using. The image is quite large and may take some time to download. Once it has downloaded, open VirtualBox. Select File > Import Appliance. Note: The Windows 11 image is already setup and ready to go, so I don’t have to install it from scratch like I did with the Linux machines. Once I add it, I will be able to boot right into it. Thus, I am importing an appliance (ready to go) and not adding a new machine as I did before:
Select the .ova file you downloaded and click next:
To change the default resource designations, you can double-click on them and adjust them. I’m going with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. Click Finish and wait for it to be imported. It can take a few minutes. Once it’s finished, open the machines settings:
I renamed mine to Sales 1, because this machine is going to go in the sales department of this office. Next, I’ll go to the Network settings and connect the machine to the Internal Network:
Start the machine and give it some time to get itself ready:
Once booted, open the Terminal (Right-click on the desktop and select Open In Terminal) and input ipconfig to see the network adapter settings:
The machine has successfully received an IP address from the firewall. Now, I’ll ping Google to make it can connect to the internet:
Perfect. I now have a working Windows 11 client. Next, I’m going to add a HR&Finance client and a Development client to this network.
