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Choice Between Windows Workgroup vs. Domain with Active Directory

I am setting up a network with a Proliant ML350 Server running Server 2008 R2. There will be six desktops. The main programs that will be installed on the server and accessible from the workstations are two line-of-business applications, neither of which will be using SQL Server. There will NOT be Exchange running on the server . In order to maximize on server resources (there are 12GB's of RAM and hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration) I was not going to install Active Directory and set the network up as a Workgroup instead of a Domain.

Are there any drawbacks to this?

Is this the best choice for what I need?

Thanks.

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naomelixes

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TTauri

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Lee W, MVP

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b1dupree

ASKER

Thanks for your responses. I have dealt with Active Directory on a number of servers. My conerns were the overhead for running Active Directory (server resources) etc. versus the benefits but it appears that given the server hardware resources available (BTW is a current model Xeon processor) it shouldn't be an issue.

TTauri

If you are going to be maintaining this and you are happy with AD then the benefits make it a good choice to use even for only 6 desktops.

Lee W, MVP

AD is NOT a resource intensive service. I have a 2003 R2 x64 VM running on Hyper-V R2 SP1 with 768 MB of RAM allocated and it's claiming only 250 MB is used. DNS is NOT a resource intensive service. Nor is DHCP. In a network of THOUSANDS, yes, they can be intensive... in a network of 6 you'd literally have to spend money and time trying to identify the amount of performance degradation you get... it would be SOOO small.

kevinhsieh

I would install AD in an environment of 3 machines. Two machines I would need to think about. As for a performance difference, you could run it on a PIII, 128 MB RAM under Windows 2003. The only downside I see is that it will add to the boot time of your server.