Windows 7 DirectAccess User Experience

This is a follow-up posting with Windows 7 DirectAccess Explained. Here, I configured a simple infrastructure with my Hyper-V-enabled laptop to demonstrate the user's experience in accessing corporate resources with DirectAccess including:

• dc.contoso.com

DC/DNS/DHCP/CA

• da.contoso.com

DirectAccess server with 2 network adapters and 2 consecutive Ipv4 addresses assigned to the one connected to the Internet

• app.contoso.com

An internal only application server

• win7-client.contoso.com

A Windows 7 machine configured as a DirectAccess client 

The demonstration shows with DirectAccess a user can securely access authorized corporate resources with the same experience working remotely without connecting to a virtual private network (VPN) as one would have when working in the office.