Standard Environment in Visual Studio ALM 11 using Workgroup machines

As I mentioned before, there’s the possibility of creating Standard Environments using Workgroup-joined machines and not just domain-joined machines.

All you need is to use Shadow Accounts (ie. “DOMAIN\account” and “account” on the local machine, or both “account”), better in the form .\account.

The magic is behind that is really easy: as the Microsoft’s KB says, “…NetLogon does not differentiate between a nonexistent domain, an untrusted domain, and an incorrectly typed domain name.”.

So if you use the same account&password couple, you won’t have problems in using them in Standard Environments