Profile Manager & Active Directory

[Sibrows]

I've just posted the following to the Apple Support forum but I wanted to see if anyone else was using Profile Manager in this way here?

https://discussions.apple.com/message/27222793

 

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Background:

I work for a large school in the UK each student now has their own iPad.

 

We've experimented with various MDM solutions but Profile Manager appears to have one major flaw that I can't believe I'm the only one to find...

The issue:

Mac Mini running OS X 10.9.5 with Server 3.2.2 connected to Active Directory (2012 native mode).

Profile Manager is applying settings and apps based on the user's group in Active Directory. This was working fine for about two months we'd enrolled coming up for 400 users and then overnight we had an issue with the settings being removed from every enrolled device and the devices have become detached from the user.

Current progress:

First time this happened half convinced myself that it was something that either me or one of my team had done had caused the issue so manually re-associated each device with each user.

 

Then it happened again less than a month after that. This time I logged a fault with Apple who've investigated and tracked the fault back to being "loosing connectivity with Active Directory". I'd happily accept that this could be the issue but we're running with a pair of Domain Controllers each on separate virtual hosts. Both the virtual hosts and the Mac running profile manager are connected to the same HP ProCurve switch.

 

I can't see any issues in the logs on our Virtual Cluster or on the HP ProCurve switch.

 

As a result I have a hard time believing that this is the cause and now Apple would like to charge me to troubleshoot an issue that appears to be more fundamental with Profile Manager.

 

 

1. Am I the only one trying to use Profile Manager in this way?
   
2. Is what I'm asking of the hardware or software in anyway unreasonable? - Before configuring I found an Apple KB article about the response times for the previous version of Profile Manager with apparent support for 1,000+ devices.
   

Edited December 4, 2014 by ZeroHour
Fixing font - ZH

[davidacland]

Might not be what you want to hear but from my experience I don't think Profile Manager is really stable enough for this scale of deployment, particularly when it is leveraging Active Directory. Some of the errors are probably OS X dropping its connection with Active Directory, rather than a physical network connectivity issue between the Mac server and the domain controllers.

 

We've been using Casper for the past few years, which is more designed for enterprise size setups.

 

David Acland - Amsys