For more details of what is supported, check out the Knowledge Center article “Managed Cloud Windows – Sphere’s of Support.”

Here are three reasons why extending Fanatical Support for Active Directory makes transitioning your Microsoft applications, including business productivity and collaboration applications, to the Open Cloud easier, more secure and more cost effective than ever before:

Reason 1: Active Directory Provides a Single Set of Credentials

Keeping track of unique logins for individual Cloud Servers has been a challenge for anyone who’s using a cloud platform to host Windows services. Now, with Active Directory in the cloud, Rackspace Engineers can configure a one-way Forest Trust between your on-premise, dedicated and Cloud Servers to deliver a single set of credentials that will provide authentication and authorization to all of your servers and services.

This creates a number of options to make your transition to the cloud easier.  Specifically, complex web apps, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint, can be deployed to the Open Cloud and have Active Directory authentication for users.

Reason 2: Active Directory Provides Better Security

Security of your data is critical. Rackspace Support Engineers can help you use the security features provided by Active Directory Domain Services and other Rackspace cloud products to reduce the risk of lost passwords, weak passwords and unenforced security controls.

You can further increase the security posture of your Cloud Servers by using Rackspace Cloud Networks to create a private network to isolate traffic to just your Cloud Servers; RackConnect to protect your servers with a stateful firewall; and Cloud Backup to complete your data protection strategy with file-level daily backups.

Reason 3: Active Directory in the Cloud is More Cost Effective

Moving your Active Directory Domain Controller and other applications to the cloud has additional advantages as well. Cloud computing resources costing significantly less than dedicated infrastructure, meaning you can architect your environment to perform better and be more fault tolerant with each server appropriately sized for the role it plays in the environment as opposed to having one larger dedicated box forced to play multiple roles.

So, since Active Directory does not require a significant amount of resources a 1GB Managed Cloud Server at $0.18/hr should be sufficient.  However, keep in mind that best practices still encourage deploying a minimum of two Active Directory Domain Controllers in the environment for redundancy.

Dos and Don’ts of Hosting Active Directory Services in the Open Cloud

Generally speaking, when using RackConnect, all ports are usually allowed from the Cloud Servers to the dedicated servers.  But if you have specific compliance requirements, like PCI, then only specific ports must be allowed and the RPC dynamic range ports must be “pegged” on each domain controller.

Keep in mind that cloning or re-building your Domain Controller from a snapshot is not supported by Rackspace and is discouraged by Microsoft. Microsoft’s best practices says to not recover a Domain Controller from a back-up, but rather build a new one and allow the built-in replication to bring the Domain Controller up to the appropriate level, hence the recommendation for two.

Also, you’ll still have a problem when you try to rebuild from the snapshot; the rebuild will run into a conflict when it tries to set a local password since Domain Controllers do not have local accounts.  If you would like a more in-depth explanation on this, check out the Knowledge Center Article about Why Password Reset Fails on a Domain Controller.

You’ll save yourself a few hours of headaches if you don’t snapshot your Active Directory.

These images are ideal for customers looking for short-term, project-based SharePoint deployments for a test “sandbox” and proof of concept efforts. They should also save you time deploying and help you avoid burning up resources by spinning up a VM on your laptop.

Both images include all of the components necessary for a fully functioning SharePoint deployment, including a web server and database, all on a single server. While they lack some enterprise features, they meet general SharePoint needs.

The SharePoint image you choose depends on what you hope to accomplish. Both instances include SharePoint 2010 Foundation. The key difference between the images is that one is a stand-alone install with Microsoft SQL Server Express, while the other is a complete farm install with Microsoft SQL Server Standard, Visual Studio and Active Directory.

What does that mean?

The instance with SQL Server Express will cost you less because Microsoft provides this version at no cost and without any licensing fees. While it is free of licensing fees, Microsoft SQL Server Express has a maximum database size limitation of 10GB per database. You should only select this instance if you know you will have a small amount of files with a limited number of users. Otherwise, you could walk in one day and discover that SharePoint is down because you have run out of space. To avoid this, you can select the instance with SQL Server Standard, which will remove the 10GB database limitation. While you do have to pay Microsoft licensing fees for SQL Server Standard, your database can take full advantage of all the space available on your Cloud Server.

Another thing to note is that the instance with SQL Server Express is set up as a stand-alone deployment. As a result, it cannot later be added to a SharePoint farm.

If you anticipate the need to scale up to a larger environment in the future or add an additional Web Front End (WFE), you may want to consider the Rackspace SharePoint image that includes the full version of Microsoft SQL Server Standard. This instance is a complete install of SharePoint Foundation 2010 in a farm, but deployed on a single Cloud Server.

The instance with SQL Server Express also does not come with Active Directory installed, while the image with MS SQL Standard includes Active Directory.

You might wonder; how does that work?

The image with SQL Server Express uses local accounts where Active Directory service accounts would typically be used. Users authenticate against local accounts on the server itself; user permissions and restrictions are unique for that server. This is fine if you are only using one server and never intend to add it to a SharePoint farm. And as we described earlier, this install was done as a stand-alone deployment, so you won’t be able to do that anyway.

The instance with SQL Server Standard comes with Active Directory, which you need to utilize when you connect to a SharePoint Server farm. This instance is a single server deployment, but it has the capability to be added to a larger farm and thus needs Active Directory. Because this deployment has Active Directory and a full version of SQL Server, it could be used as a production SharePoint site in a pinch, despite it not necessarily following some of the recommended best practices for a production SharePoint site, specifically because it’s deployed on a single server.

And if you need additional support for these SharePoint images, Rackspace Professional Services for SharePoint has a suite of service offerings you can leverage, feel free to contact them with any questions you have at sharepoint@rackspace.com.