How to simulate a large network of machines for testing?

Question

Currently, I am writing an application that utilizes WMI to scan all the computers on our Active Directory network.

I'm interested in testing the program against all flavors of Windows machines in a testing environment.

Is there a way to similuate this environment in VMware or something?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

VMWare works well and can host many virtual computers on a single physical computer. You can also put the virtual computers on your active directory network.

If your goal is to set up a separate large network for testing that has it's own AD server you can look into Amazon EC2 for testing. The advantage here is once you setup your set of servers, you can turn them on and off as needed and only pay for the time actually used ($0.12 per hour).

http://aws.amazon.com/