June 3rd, 2008The "Mac Lab" Project Begins
May was a heavy travel month for me which kept me away from the office and took away my will to blog for a bit so I wanted to give a bit of an update.
At the beginning of May we made the decision to move forward on building our Mac testing lab in order to build out our standards and best practices for Mac integration into the Church IT environment, particularly in working with Active Directory. To accomplish this we purchased a small stable of Mac Minis and several copies of OSX Server 10-user edition. Additionally, I made the decision to convert to running on a Mac full-time and purchased a MacBook Pro. (That will be the subject of a future blog, I’ll focus on the lab for now.)
What will we be testing?
Since our church client-base can vary drastically in size we want to address configurations that will be applicable to all of them. The following scenarios will be built in the lab to document the strengths and weaknesses of each.
- Stand-alone configuration
- Most mac users operate this way already
- Native OSX Active Directory Binding
- Native OSX Binding with Apple Schema Extensions
- Active Directory/Open Directory Integration
- A.K.A. the “Triangle”
- Third-Party integration solutions
Lab Configuration
The current lab configuration consists of 4 Mac Minis and a PowerEdge SC1420. Two of the Minis have been upgraded to 2GB RAM and are running OSX Server 10-User edition to act as our test server environment. The remaining Minis will be used to test client operations both in and out of the office. The SC1420 currently runs VMWare Server on top of CentOS 5.1 x64 and hosts two virtual machines, the Lab DC and the Lab File Server. Additional virtual servers will be brought online as needed during the third-party tools portion of the lab.
Goals
The end result of this experience is to define solid best-practices and a comprehensive solution for the integration of Macs into existing Windows IT infrastructure, specifically in the church environment.
June 4th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Hello! Interesting project. I thought that since you are testing products you should also be aware of Likewise Software’s Mac capabilities. We have our Enterprise version, of course, and we also have Likewise Open; please feel free to download it and give it a try. We are developing some new Mac functionality that works with Mac Workgroup manager. We have done a demo for some Apple technical folks and they are pretty excited about it. It will be part of our 5.0 release in August but we can demo it now. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions and/or are interested in a demo. Good luck with your project!
June 5th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Another 3rd party solution has been brought to my attention, http://www.cyansoftware.com/MacServerIP.htm