Security for a day

Arrgh! The old machine I had set up to run my virtual machines on isn’t up to the RAM or CPU of testing out Ms ForeFront.

I was trying out Ms Virtual Server to overcome a weakness Vmware has when trying to emulate Ms load balancing. Why bother with load balancing? Load balanced ISA’s in arrays is my reason. Having a room full of machines and switches at home isn’t very energy or space friendly, plus with the hot weather I don’t need an indoor sauna 
I decided to try it anyway and to load the six Fore Front roles on to one VM. The Installer demanded a base of 1Gb of RAM and LOTS of disk space. It all so moaned about the system not being dual processor.

My old test box was already running VM’s of a DC, ISA 2004, a file server and a little XP box and things went south fast. It was like running in mud, everything went in to slow motion and swapping between machines wasn’t fun.

Time to go shopping.

One new funky Motherboard, x64 Processor and 8GB of Ram later and it’s time to re-build the lab.

Oh the joys of a clean, full patched and formated system!