First, thank you very much for your detailed input.

I do have remote access to the customer network and their VM where I can test the app against AD. But something does not work and I thought it would be nice to test it on my PC first.

I will read all your suggestions; and if possible - and not too much time consuming - will follow one of the options. I am already over my head with this project (which was supposed to be no time, that is, no billable time :). It will be a long working day tomorrow :)
Again, thank you!


>The easiest thing by far is to beg or plead your client or someone else who already has an AD environment set up to give you some access. Or tell your client it'll be $Xk more if they don't and you have to set up your own test environment, maybe that would persuade them.
>
>If you need a test environment there are some options:
>
>1. Spin up a Windows server VM on Azure and configure AD and IIS. You could optionally spin up a separate Win10 VM to connect to the server VM for your testing, or use your Win7 or Win10 box to connect to the Azure VM. If you're interested in this you might research options for spinning up a preconfigured AD/IIS environment, someone might already offer this (for a price). A brief scan of https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/services/virtual-machines/#get-started shows an IIS setup in the "5 minute quickstarts" section.
>
>I suggest a separate workstation VM because you'll want to join it to the AD domain, which you may not want to do with your dev machine(s).
>
>2. Set up a local AD test environment. This is the same as #1 except you run it on local hardware instead of the cloud. You need a decent computer on which you can allocate a couple of CPU cores, about 100GB disk space and (say) 4+ GB RAM in order to create one or more VMs. You would install a hypervisor - on Win10 Pro or better you can use Microsoft Hyper-V, otherwise Oracle VM VirtualBox is a good free choice. You can download a free 180 day evaluation of a current Windows server product and install that on a VM. As with the Azure option you then configure AD and IIS. You can optionally create another VM for a workstation, or connect with the host computer (bridged networking required in the hypervisor for this).
>
>3. A different spin on #2 is to install Linux on a VM, and install and configure Samba on that Linux VM. Samba is the only AD emulator I know of. The only real advantage of this is it's free and won't expire, but if 180 days is long enough to do your testing you might as well use a real Windows server product in evaluation mode.
>
>*
>If Azure can give you a VM preconfigured with Windows Server, AD and IIS, that might be the simplest. I'm not sure if a free (for 12 months) Azure VM option would be available for that, otherwise there are associated ongoing costs. On the other hand, if you want to roll your own local environment, that's not trivial.
>
>Some further discussion (c. 2016) at https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1662896-set-up-an-at-home-test-environment-to-learn-server-management
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>Do you know if there is a product/tool that could help simulating Active Directory on a Windows 7 computer that does not have real AD? Just so that I can test the ASP.NET application against an AD