Network Management VM - Tools and Settings

[BKGarry]

Morning all,

 

Thought this would be a good little subject to get some ideas bouncing around.

 

At work I work on an iMac all day with a windows VM in Virtual box for the majority of my tasks. I have 2 separate accounts, my regular bog standard staff account that I use all day long with no elevated rights, this is the account my email is connected to, has all my documents and I use for day to day tasks such as SIMS. It does not have the ability to run any of the MMC addins for AD, GPO and all the other fun.

 

I also have a domain "support" account, which is pretty much a full admin account, which I use to use RDC to connect to servers and make changes etc.

 

I was thinking of setting up a secondary VM on my mac that this account could be open in for a lot of the AD and GPO management stuff etc.

 

I was thinking about having it as Win7 64bit (as we still do not have any DCs over 2012, but that is being sorted in the summer) and installing RSAT on in for the AD stuff and our Safecom Print Management.

 

I was thinking how would you guys do this, would you add on any extra tools, specialist settings etc.

 

The good thing is that I can leave both VMs open in full screen and flick between them. As I run access Spiceworks and Edugeek all day through Safari on OS X and flick to my windows VM for outlook etc.

 

Look forward to hearing all of your suggestions.