Windows Server 2022 Home Lab — AD DS, DNS, CA and Secured RDP

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article describes the full setup of a two-server Windows Server 2022 home lab in Proxmox VE. Together the two virtual machines provide Active Directory Domain Services, DNS, Group Policy and a Certificate Authority (ADCS). RDP connections are secured with PKI certificates so that the Mac Mini M1 management workstation connects without certificate warnings.

This is part 3 of the series on building a Windows DevOps lab in Proxmox. In part 1 I described how to create a VM, and in part 2 how to prepare the template.

Windows Server 2022 — Active Directory and DNS Installation

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

In this article I describe step by step how I installed Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and DNS on a Windows Server 2022 Datacenter VM in a VMware Fusion lab environment. The result is a fully functional domain controller for the domain lab.local, as the foundation for a Windows DevOps lab.

Environment

Component	Value
Virtualisation	VMware Fusion (macOS)
Guest operating system	Windows Server 2022 Datacenter (Desktop Experience)
Hostname	DC01
Domain name	lab.local
NetBIOS name	LAB
Lab network adapter	Ethernet1 — 172.16.37.10 (static IP)
Internet adapter	Ethernet0 — DHCP via VMware NAT

Step 1 — Configure Networking

Before installing Active Directory, the domain controller needs a static IP address. AD DS and DNS depend on a stable address.

Devops on Notities

Windows Server 2022 Home Lab — AD DS, DNS, CA and Secured RDP

Windows Server 2022 — Active Directory and DNS Installation

Environment

Step 1 — Configure Networking