A couple of the small businesses I look after are big enough to take advantage of an Active Directory Domain but not big enough to warrant running a full on Windows server.
I was at a Synology training course in Manchester on Tuesday and the first thing we did was set up an AD domain using the Synology as the AD server. It’s powered by Samba and supports commonly used Active Directory features such as user accounts, group memberships, domain-joining Windows, Linux and Synology DSM, Kerberos-based authentication, and group policies. It’s compatible with the Windows RSAT tools so you don’t need to login to the Synology after it’s initial set up to do AD tasks.
Unfortunately you can’t use it on every Synology model and from a quick look at the list it looks like Intel CPUs only. So the cheapest chassis would be the 2 bay DS216+II @ £300 but that’s cheaper than Windows Server 2016 Essentials OEM with no hardware! A Synology is a piece of piss to setup compared to Windows. Also the Intel CPU chassis can use BTRFS rather than just EXT4. Unfortunately I only own ARM units, as do all my customers, so I can’t do any further playing about.
Us 50+ delegates were all using virtual Synology servers running on the new FlashStation chassis with 24 x 2.5″ SAS SSD and an 8 core 2.1Ghz Xeon D-1541. It was a BYOD affair so we were using our own laptops via WiFi to 3 x RT2600ac routers. It all worked perfectly.
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