What is the crowd's opinion of Univention Corporate Server?

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Hey Chris,

If you are only planning for a small DC for your homelab I would go with a virtual machine. For just couple of instances you really don't need to bother with a bare metal machine and that way it is far easier to do snapshots or backups.

Turst me on this, you need at least semi-regular backups of that machine. It can really throw a wrench into your week when your DC just dies one day and you can't just reload a previous state. Or when you f something up in the configuration and can't just go back.

On a side-node: If you aren't already sworn to the Microsoft overlords, have a look at Univention's UCS. It's a great piece of open source software and won't cost you a dime. They might not invite you to as many conference trips as microsoft does, but it never let me down and plays so good with mircosofts clients and structure (thanks to samba), you can literally use the AD tools from microsoft to manage it.

I use Univention Corporate Server (UCS) it is Debian-based and it works remarkably well for Active Directory with Multiple AD Servers as well (active backup servers). It has more functionality than just an AD clone. It also has DHCP, DNS, and several/many free or paid add-ons. It works well enough that my Windows VMs and workstations do not appear to be able to tell it is not connected to Windows Active Directory - including Exchange, SharePoint, Dynamics, MS SQL Server, etc. My company is a Microsoft Partner and while we have no problem supporting clients with Microsoft products, we use Microsoft as little as possible in house due to Linux and FOSS fulfilling our needs better, cheaper, and usually faster. Finding and evaluating UCS was the last piece to move away from MS internally.

I came across to this german distribution that is designed to be a microsoft server replacement.

https://www.univention.com/products/ucs/

Tried zentyal and broke it million of times. Univention seems to be pretty solid so far.