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,
Mike
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