Basic help with designing new mac infrastructure

[topcat]

[b]I hope somebody can offer some advice, but im after some advise or pointers on where to start on the design of our new Mac infrastructure. I would love to get some help in with this, but unfortunately with the way the budgets have worked out, there is no money at present :([/b]

[b]Is there a webpage or document that may be of help when planning a new mac infrastructure? [/b]

A work in a college with about 140 Macs, most under 3 years old, most running 10.4, some 10.5 and these are spread over two sites a few miles apart linked with a 100mb connection.

At the moment they are all individual workstations, but we do have an old G4 Xserve and an old XRAID with 5TB of storage. I have also just been bought 4 quad core Xserves and a 5.1TB Promise RAID to work with, so I have some good kit now.

We are mainly a Windows based college, and rely heavily on Active Directory for everything, so more than likely, we will be using AD for the Macs. This will save duplicating data into OD, and will help with things like authentication to our web proxy and Cisco wireless. I want to keep the feel of using a pure Open Directory syetem, ideally with use of features such as the wiki and blogs, but using the existing AD accounts.

So far my simple idea has been this:

Have an xserve at each site where the main site is an OD master, and the secondary site in a OD Replica

Put the new Promise RAID at the main site, the old Xraid at the 2nd site

Create user groups in OD for each class eg Phtography, Music etc.

Import the users that are on each class from AD into the OD groups for management

Enable SMB and AFP shares on the RAIDs and point the users home in AD to the RAID share. This way the student can login on a Windows box and the drive will get mounted via SBM from the raid, and when on a mac will mount using AFP

These are my main questions though:
– What would you use 2 4 core xserves at each site for? Wouldnt 1 each be enough?
– How does this work with laptop users. If we were using AD, can we use mobile homes for login cache?
– Network homes and saving seems ok for photoshop and indesign, but how well does it handle Logic or even Final Cut Pro? We are only 100mb switches and 100mb to the desktop, can you keep final cut local and sync to the network on logout?

Any help would be appreciated, its a scary project!

[tlarkin]

I will try to answer your questions as best as I can.

[quote]These are my main questions though:
– What would you use 2 4 core xserves at each site for? Wouldnt 1 each be enough?[/quote]

When it comes to servers, if you have the budget just buy the higher spec’d one. It will be more worth it in the long run.

[quote]- How does this work with laptop users. If we were using AD, can we use mobile homes for login cache?[/quote]

I manage a complete 100% OD network. However, how I would do it would be as follows: Use AD for authentication only, and use the OD server for everything else. Keep mobile homes on the OD. We run 5,500 macbooks on my network and we run mobile homes off of the OD. This would require you put more HD space on your Xserves but in the end I think it is better managed that way. You can bind your OD servers to the AD master server so the client can authenticate and get drives mapped via AD, but get group policy and home folders from the OD. This is commonly called the magic or golden triangle. I am sure there is a plethora of articles out there on that subject to help you.

[quote]Network homes and saving seems ok for photoshop and indesign, but how well does it handle Logic or even Final Cut Pro? We are only 100mb switches and 100mb to the desktop, can you keep final cut local and sync to the network on logout?[/quote]

In OS X server under work group manager, you can set the sync preferences to exclude or include certain directories and file types. For example on my network we only sync the documents folder and nothing else.

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