OD vs. AD

Question

Level 1

5 points

OD vs. AD

This may be the wrong place to ask this. In our company we have mostly Macs and a few PCs. Is there any advantage of choosing OD vs AD? I know that they are interchangeable to some degree, but i was wondering what the pros and cons of each are.

Thanks

Ashu

Powerbook 15 1.5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Dec 21, 2005 3:37 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Jan 3, 2006 4:07 PM in response to Ashu

It's easier to connect and managed Macs with the info in OD, than it is to manage Windows machines using OD. So if you need to actually manage the PCs, AD is probably the only solution. That said, if you don't have a big IT department dictating lockdown policies, it's unlikely that this is the case.

OD is great for managing Macs and for providing centralized login, authentication, authorization, and directory services. And you can do an implementation for a LOT less than AD. It's almost impossible to roll out a pratical AD setup for under $100K. For OD, you could do pretty well at $10K (a pair of Xserves -- master and replica, with the replica running most of the services).

Reply

Answer 2

Ashu Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 3, 2006 5:57 PM in response to William Lloyd

We actually have about 50 workstations here and about 7 are PCs. Mostly for accounting and Human Resources etc. Obviously those would need to be locked down quite hard to protect sensetive material.

As far a single sign on is concerned OD and AD seem to be comparable. Its just that I feel the benefits of Group Policy, AD integrated VPN, DNS, and DHCP are too hard to resist. Is there any way to do those things in OD or does MS have a hold on that area?

Another thing I was wondering about was MS has a technology called RPC over HTTP which would allow a controller sitting offsite to be part of the same Domain without the use of a compulsary tunnel. Is there anything like that coming to OD?

Reply

Answer 3

Jan 8, 2006 6:51 PM in response to Ashu

Ahhh HR......Are you under the gun of Sarbanes-Oxley at all? If so, you really have no choice but to use Active Directory. I'm not sure where the "$100K" figure comes from, though. Win2K3 SBS can be had for far less than that with 50 clients ($1000 per 20 licenses).

You could always integrate OS X Server into an AD environment to get the management capabilities of it for your Mac boxes.

Reply