Best way of adding a sub domain

[tookawhile]

We have a very simple setup at the moment, just one domain, mycompany.com (I believe it should have been named local.company.com - can I this be easily rectified?)and all works fine.

My problems is this, we have a bunch of test PC's which are not allowed on the domain (in case our software goes crazy or something), so they end up in our default workgroup 'TEST'.

This has been all well and good in the past, but I've just allowed myself VPN access and when you enter browse the workgroup our 'TEST' group appears, this is Ok as long has nobody has allowed a share on any of the machines, but if they have, well you can see it and access (read only), as you have limited permissions settings on XP Pro as it is not in the domain. I wish to block this somehow.

I figured one of the following might solve the issue but I uncertain, they are:

1) Create a sub domain - test.mycompany.com and place the test PC's there?
2) Create a subnet under the existing domain?

 

[kmcferrin]

Create a completely separate domain and don't set up a trust between the two. And/or put them on physically separate networks (or VLANs). If they still need access to resources from mycompany.com, you can try making two child domains called production.mycompany.com and test.mycompany.com. But your infrastructure pieces in production and your regular production systems in production, then put your test systems in test.

 

[tookawhile]

Thanks for the info.

Part of the problem is that from time to time the TEST group will need access to the domain, so the 2 child domain approach seems the best way forward.

 

[tookawhile]

I have further information now and more questions!

To complicate matters further, we have around 30 build/test/processing farm PCs, which we are trying to implement using VM technology, unfortunately this is causing DHCP issues.

Each time ATF launches a virtual machine instance to execute a test, the source
virtual machine is copied, and the copied machine is powered on. Although it
shares the same host name as its parent, each copied machine appears to the
DHCP server as a new machine and is allocated a new IP address. Over time,
under heavy use the pool of available IP addresses becomes exhausted and newly
created VMs are unable to connect to the network, preventing them from being
able to run the test.

One suggested solution to this may involve having all VMs on a
separate TEST domain that is trusted by machines on the MAIN domain. This
domain could have a separate DHCP server that has a different policy regarding
leasing of IP addresses: instead of an address being leased for 5 days (as is
the case at the moment) the time could be shortened so that addresses become
available for reuse as soon as the VM has shut down.

Can I have 2 DHCP servers on the same network if the domains are different?