I have a home network consisting of a few physical machines (all windows XP,7) and recently I have built an esxi box for creating virtual machines.
Thus far I have been enabling file sharing to specific folders by creating the same user account on each pc that I want to share or access files on, it's getting to the point where I would like to centralise these accounts in one spot.
What is a simple option that would allow me to centralise my windows logins, I did try to setup AD once but I'm not very experienced with it and got lost fairly quickly, I'm primarily a developer so haven't had much experience with the windows server OSs (not afraid to try though provided I can find some good resources).
I'm not too bothered about having roaming profiles etc, at a minimum I would like to just centralise this account details and that would be great, if I could maybe get the pcs to run logon scripts to map drives that would be good to but not 100% necessary.