Newbie Q: Connecting & Managing Macs on a Windows Domain

[BlueMagician]

Hello All,

A newbie question for you all please..

I've been told it's dead easy to 'connect' a Mac to a Windows 2000/2003 domain - to add the machines into the Active Directory, to authenticate and map to shares etc etc..

Would there be any reason to buy an Xserve ? Is there anything funky that you can do to 'manage' a Mac and it's applications, that can't be done from either the W2k/W2003 server, or say a Mac Pro with the right tools installed? If so, what might these tools be ?

My main reason for asking this is that we have a Windows 2003 server acting as a second DC to our PC network with 750GB of RAID5, 2GB RAM, Dual Xeons, which is currently doing next to nothing, and I don't particularly want to duplicate this spec in an Xserve + Xserve RAID for no reason, just to be able to 'manage' 40 new macs..


Thanks so much in advance!!
S.

[Splash]

http://www.apple.com/itpro/articles/adintegration/ should cover your needs, depending on your definition of "managing"

[BlueMagician]

Thanks for the great linky! So, just to clarify one of my points, is there anything funky that only a dedicated Apple Xserve could do? Can't quite figure that out..

Cheers,
S.