[Samba] Migrating, Upgrading & Testing Samba 4 PDC/BDC

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2016-09-30 at 11:24 -0400, James B. Byrne via samba wrote:
> On Thu, September 29, 2016 09:57, Charish Patel wrote:
> > 
> > If you mean regular Microsoft AD, the reason is simple: cost.
> > Management sadly does not want to shell out the money for it.
> > 
> 
> We went to Samba for the simple reason that we could not figure out
> how much the licensing costs would be to upgrade our ancient W2KAS
> domain controller.
> 
> Back in the day Microsoft shipped access licences with every copy of
> WinXPpro.  They also did not count a DHCP assignment to a network
> device or DNS lookup from one as needing a license.
> 
> None of this, according to the information we were provided by a MS
> 'partner' when we investigated this, is the case any longer.  Not to
> mention we informed that we needed to licence every core; and that
> additional licences were required if, god forbid, direct access from
> the internet was intended.
> 
> In the end we gave up even trying to figure out a configuration that
> would minimise our expense on equipment that would suit our needs. 
> There was just too much administrative effort required to get the
> cost
> pinned down to something manageable.  Then we had to look at the
> ongoing costs of compliance.  For large corporations that have the
> money to bleed into MS and have the staff to jump through their
> compliance hoops, and who no doubt enjoy a deep corporate discount,
> it
> is a game that they can afford.  We just shook our heads in disbelief
> and walked away.

Indeed, many of our users are in the same boat.  If you are fortunate
enough only to have windows clients, and not servers, the first windows
server is really, really expensive, because of the expansive definition
of client for CALs. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba