We run a moderately sized Hosting Company, all of our machines (around 100 or so) run Windows Server 2008 R2. About 30 of these are our shared hosting machines which we run and host client applications (game/voice servers) on, the rest are Dedicated Machines rented by customers.
For our shared hosting machines, we handle things such as Administrator password changes, scheduled tasks, etc. by connecting via RDP and making the necessary changes. This has become quite tedious as we expand, and I believe AD may help ease this pain.
Scenario:
We only have one account per machine we actually use, which is the Administrator account. Each client's service runs under a limited user account for security purposes, which is logged in when they start their services via our Control Panel.
We have a Master machine which acts as the main File Server for our Management Software, runs the Management Software's Web Panel, etc.
Questions:
Would Active Directory be beneficial to us in our current setup?
If we used our "Master" server machine as the primary Active Directory Controller, would we need CALs for each machine, or would/could the Administrator account on each machine actually just count as a single user CAL?
Server 2008 Standard comes with 5 CALs I believe. If we do need one for each machine, do these all have to be on the Controller or would the CALs from the client systems count towards this?