Ok, so when last we left I was rambling on about hoping to get Macs with good Vistas or at least a lot of eXPerience. Well I have been talking to Patrick at the Apple National Education Center and have been assured that there are ways to accomplish the primary goal! In fact there seems to be at least two ways to do this:
One is the use of of the third-party software, Parallels, to start a virtual Windows session to run your Windows applications. On the plus side if you have a problem with the windows portion you could just push a new Windows image file out to the computer.
The second is to use what the Mac people call BootCamp which is already apart of the Mac OS. This solution will require that the user restart the computer in question and choose which OS to use. As a foot note, David, an inside Systems Engineer at Apple, told me that there is even a FREE boot manager that could be loaded so that the computer will boot into a GUI and present the user with a Choice via two buttons on the desktop! While this seems the easy road he did caution me to consider the roll-out process. It seems that to get an image of this computer I will need to use third-party software (Casper... I think) because of the NTFS partition. This has all the hallmarks of a good decision and I will probably follow this path.
Next in line is the server options... Again Patrick and David were there to answer my initial questions. First and foremost is the burning Question about whether or not we can control/manage windows computers from the Xserve. The answer is a resounding yes. Through the use of OpenDirectory and other OpenSource software it is possible to talk to Active Directory.
My plan is ambitious, but I hope to be able to pull it off... I want to completely remove AD from my network and use the Mac servers to authenticate against for all computers and have the windows servers regulated to very specific job rolls in the hope of eliminating the need for CALs.
Next step.. "The Meeting" with the Mac people. I hope to have more information on this tale in 2 weeks or so. Until then, I will more than likely have something else to say about something.
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