Hello. I've seen a few people do this but I'd like to confirm that this is a good idea.
We are looking to upgrade our server infrastructure at my school. Right now we are running Zentyal 3.* on a regular PC desktop box as a server, also holding the user data. The main purpose is to do active directory stuff for legacy WinXP systems and a few Win7+ systems, in addition to having home directories, local intranet website, etc. So far everything has been great but we have been terribly afraid of upgrading to Zentyal 4.
We are working on a new infrastructure like such:
The user data is kept on a NAS (presumably Synologie) and mounted on the Server. The server host is a Mac Mini running Virtualbox. the virtualized server is Zentyal 4.1.
Right now this seems like a pretty good option, and this link,
https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,16854.msg66882/topicseen.html#msg66882, proves to me that running VB isn't a crazy idea. the only difference is our proposed hardware, a Mac Mini.
Still, I was wondering what the community's opinion was. Is there a more powerful / simpler / cheaper system out there? We are really liking Zentyal right now and love Ubuntu, but we still want to keep our complexity to a minimum so we don't need a lot of technical knowledge to manage it (Our IT department is literally 3 people and it would be good if we could train non-IT people).
Regards,
Matt