Ryan
I am not sure if this will help but I will toss in my 2 cents on the subject...
If you already have xserves in your environment and they aren't being put to use you could do OD, bind to AD and create the golden triangle like you mentioned before hand. This can come in handy to help load balance your servers. Instead of the AD server getting pounded all the time for file sharing and authentication you can balance some of that off to your OD server.
WGM should actually be called work group mangler (I can't take credit for that name either, I heard it from someone else). It has come a long way now in 10.5 but still has "frailties." I have a very strong love/hate relationship with WGM.
Even though you may not want to manage the Macs that much, with OD and MCX you can manage them very easily. No more local management and no more running scripts or what not, just update MCX, and log in/out your macs and you are now set.
I guess what I am trying to get at is that from a sys admin point of view the OD environment will give you tons of more flexibility and options to accomplish what you want with your systems, however, all of these extra luxuries also come with having to fix any problems that you might encounter with them. Over all, I think that my OD environment is good, and all but I think Apple is still a bit confused on whether or not they want to become an Enterprise level company. They seem to make great products and then fall just short somewhere here or there. Once they step it up notch they will be a heavy contender for that market share, but until then it is hard for me, or probably anyone to tell you if it is worth it or not.
I have 6,000+ macs so for me it is totally worth running OD on my servers. We are also K-12 education, so it again is worth it to me to have those management abilities of the systems.
I hope that somewhat helps,
Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351
