- This topic has 2 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 21 years, 4 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I am looking for feedback on whether it is better to host home directories on an Xserve or on a Windows 2003 server running ExtremeZ-IP. We are a school district with roughly 1500 accounts and 600-700 client machines. The client machines are about a 60-40 split in favor of Apple. All of our Apple clients will be running Tiger and all windows clients are XP. This summer we will be combining our Open Directory and Active Directory accounts. We will be merging all of our accounts into Active Directory and using that for authentication. Our goal is to have one login and a unified home directory. The debate is whether to host the home directories on an Xserve running either Panther or Tiger or host them on a Windows 2003 server with ExtremeZ-IP. This discussion arose because an Apple rep informed us that Apple only recommends 150 concurrent connections per home directory server, while Windows states that they can have 1,000’s of concurrent home directory connections. The other piece of the puzzle is that this summer all of our faculty will be receiving laptops. More than half of them will be iBooks. We plan to take advantage of the mobile home directory features in Tiger. Will it be better for them to sync to an OS X server rather than a Windows server running ExtremeZ-IP? Is anyone running a similar setup and can provide me some advice or feedback, positive or negative, about either setup?
Thanks,
MikeThose Windows servers cannot host 1000s of OSX home directory connections simultaneously. Typically, when PC server vendors say "home directory" they mean a drive that mounts on the desktop for users casually to copy personal files to. In OSX, the home directory is a live connection to the server and can be very large (multiple GB) and has to handle responsively thousands of files per user at the same time. This is a continuously accessed share for the whole time a user is logged in. Any slight hiccup in this will cause users problems.
Likewise, in windows, they do this roaming profile thing that kind of syncs back and forth on login/logout, so windows "homes" and profiles really aren’t the same as what you do in OSX, thus you can get many more connections on for "windows homes". I think if you really sized your servers appropriately for real network homes, you would be in the same ballpart as with the XServes.
Id go with XServes/XRAIDS, bind them into your AD, and serve your homes via AFP. Bind your clients to AD as well, and your users will authenticate to AD, but make an AFP connection to the Xserve as they log in to get their home. You can even keep OD around to manage preferences on your clients at the same time as having them authenticate to AD. Just bind the clients to both directories (but make sure to list AD first in directory access).
As the ExtremeZ-IP Support Lead I just want to clarify something. We do have have customers where ExtremeZ-IP is deployed in locations that have hundreds of concurrent logins with no issues. We currently max out at about 800 users because by default we have two threads per user, one for sending and one for receiving. Each Windows thread has a default stack space of 1MB so you end up running into the 2GB address space limitations fairly quickly.
That being said in most deployments you run out of network bandwidth before you hit a thousand users. Particularly if you are using applications that update files frequently such as many of the email applications.
In general though the decision to use Windows with ExtremeZ-IP or Mac OS X Server, is more based upon existing infrastructure and support staff comfort with the two platforms not the ability of the platform to support a few hundred more users per server.
Geordie Korper
ExtremeZ-IP Support Lead
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.