Setting up an AD RMS Environment at Home - Step 1: Domain Controller

My plan is to outline the steps I'm taking  to set up an AD RMS environment on my desktop PC in my home office. Hopefully this will be helpful to those of you doing the same. I'm following the AD RMS Step-by-Step Guide on TechNet.

Firstly I’m setting up a domain controller (DC). I downloaded an ISO of Windows Server 2008 Standard from MSDN and installed it on a virtual machine that I created with Virtual PC. Originally, I had tried to download the files for Windows Server 2008 from the corporate network and create my own ISO (if I recall I used the TugZip tool to create the ISO), but I ran into issues when I tried to use that ISO to install Windows Server on the virtual machine. I’d recommend downloading the ISO from MSDN and installing that on a vm.

I followed the steps to configure a static IP address for the virtual machine. I ran into an problem after assigning the IP address to 10.0.0.1 (the vm couldn't connect to the Internet). I had to assign mine to 192.168.15.109 to keep it within the range of the IP address on the host machine.

I ran dcpromo.exe (Active Directory Domain Services Installation Wizard) to set up Active Directory Domain Services and DNS.

Next I'll create the database server and try to add it to the domain.

Note (2/10/2009): I've found that it's helpful to include read_me text files with my virtual machines so I can keep track of when I created them and what my purpose was in creating them.