Creating a modern mac environment

Hi guys,

I am looking at using macs as my daily work machine and running my business from a mac base server as well. I am starting to get more and more customers with Apple that I am supporting and want to be able to keep up to-date with them as I feel I am starting to lose track of them since I sold my last mac about 4 years ago.

I just bought a iPhone 5s so that I can start supporting customers better with these (especially since iOS7 came out). To be honest it has been nice to go back to a iPhone and ditch the Androids and put my beloved Nokia 925 to one side. Anyway what I need to do is build up a new environment that will allow me to work well with customers that are using Microsoft, Apple and Google products and I feel Apple is the only logical choice for this.

I work in with a few cloud services at present such as Office 365 and Xero accounting. I need to continue to use Office 365 as I have a solution I am building to show case to customers. I need to use MS Essentials server and would be looking at running this as a VM on the server. I also want to use OSX server to run my own business as well as to show case to customers so I will be using a mix of services from MS and Apple and possibly Google in the future.

I guess I am asking for feed back on what I am looking at doing what is as follows:

Mac Mini server i7 running 2x1tb hdd and 16Gb RAM. I am looking at a External HDD Raid solution to run with this for additional storage as well. I was looking at a possible USB 3 ( such as this: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/M3QX2KIT0GB/ ) or if needed a Thunderbolt solution (such as this:http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Promise Technology/PR401US/ ). I am liking the USB 3 solution mainly due to costs but I have heard of issues with OSX and USB3. Apparently drives not connecting at full speed constantly and requiring disconnection and re-connection until Full speed is detected also I have heard of issues with Thunderbolt and VM's?

I am also looking at Mac portable that I can use as my main workstation as well. I have been looking at the larger macbook Air but not sure if I will get frustrated with the performance as I want to run VM's on this as well. I will be wanting to use this as a Desktop replacement so any thoughts on the best way to dock this or make it work better at this task would be great.

I am sure some of you here have already done what I am looking at doing (perhaps not with the server side) but just wanting to get some feed back and ideas that I have not thought of. I am about to possibly spend a few grand so want to make sure it will work well before going down this path.

 

Get a seperate machine for MS Essentials. Dont run it on a VM daisy chained off a mac mini... It will just end in tears.

Macbook Air is fine for general web browsing/word processing. If you're gonna do anything serious with the CPU, get a Macbook Pro retina 13.

 

I have decided that probably doing a mac mini as a server is not going to work to well. I will probably look at just running a HP/IBM server and run just a Windows server back end.

Thanks for the reply.

 

if/when you build an SBS essentials/standard server, don't forget to change your domain to something that isn't .local (MS Default).

Mac's and .local aren't good bedfellows.

I use .lan

 

Get a mac pro and run esxi on it.

 

I've often wondered what the theory is behind this. We have a .local AD and Macs onsite bound to the AD and OD and all is swell.

I also spoke to an engineer from Apple and he reassured me that it was only an issue in the days of 10.5/10.6...

 

You mean apple caved?

thank fuck for that.

 

I run a Retina MacBook Pro [Quad, 512gb SSD and 16gb RAM] with VMware Fusion running Windows 7 and Windows 8 VM's works fine for me.

 

Here's what you need:
http://store.apple.com/au/product/T...849e7c383053db057b41315123f5b5afa7c9322df356f

Will it help you run your business? No. But you'll look really cool while trying to!

 

Use MS server as your DC - Accounts, DNS, DHCP, etc. - if you want to, Maybe just AD, depending on what role you want the Mac server to play.

.local is fine to use now.

Bind your Mac Server to AD and leverage your accounts off that, and set up an Open Directory master on the Mac Server. When you connect your workstations to AD you can also bind them at the same time to Open Directory. This will give you control of Workstation Manager (Basically Group Policy) and/or Profile Manager that works similar and good to BYOD.

 

What this guy said.

 

You're Mac server doesn't need to be "THE" server. Most environments leverage off their Windows DC. The Mac server comes in handy if you want to run Software update caching, DeployStudio (imaging and Software push), Profiles/workgroup Manage, basically - Anything the windows server won't be able to do.

In some cases, your clients may have only a Mac server, in which case, you can use accounts in OD - They're just not as easy to manage/streamline.

 

.local / any non real TLD is useless now if you're starting up now if you want to be able to use external facing services and require a verified SSL. Unless you want to reroll again after a year.

 

and by useless you mean doesn't actually matter one iota on any Microsoft server technology (because they handle both - and SAN certs are a thing) and has numerous benefits in terms of dns management of LAN/WAN addresses.

 

Ya joking?

 

Try buy a SAN certificate with a .local that has an expiry past Nov 2015 and it will get rejected. Trust me I've already tried.

http://www.tbs-certificates.com/FAQ/en/normes_tld.html

I dunno why this isn't more popular in the news.

These days with Exchange 2013 or Server 2012 RDS/Gateway you really need to be using verified SSL certs, otherwise Outlook Anywhere/RPC over HTTP won't work.

 

An error occurred

404 - The requested URL was not found.

 

Try it now the l on html got cut off.

 

this is more useful - http://www.icann.org/en/groups/ssac/documents/sac-057-en.pdf

In reading this, the basic gist i get is that because CA issuers are useless tossbags and issue TLD's that are then turned into gTLD's - granting a point of entry.

Why the hell don't they just make accepted local TLD's (much like we have internal network ip's) for the point of management.

 

So, anyway, For your own internal "Lab" (I suppose you could call it). call your domain whatever you want.

Company.pri is Greg Shields favourite for internal.