OAM and MS Active Directory Integration on Non-Windows Server envrionment

Question

I will start by saying that I am dealing with a heterogeneous environment here where multiple systems are run by different levels of management. Our Oracle systems chose to go all *nix (Oracle Solaris and Red Hat Linux) and hence we do not have a single Windows Server in our Oracle services area and would really like to keep it that way as we prefer to keep a uniform platform across our Oracle servers.  However, the desktop side of our department has chosen to use Microsoft Active Directory and now we wish to integrate and perform authentication against it for our OAM protected sites.  We are in the initial setup phase but we have no desire to implement a critical server such as OAM on the Windows platform and would rather tie OAM running on a Red Hat Linux server to Active Directory.  We will also be using OID as we run Portal but do not want to use it as our authentication authority for Oracle Products (local policy is that Active Directory is the only valid credential authority on site as we are moving to true Single Sign On across our desktops and web applications).  I have a few questions.
1. Can it be done natively or would we have to run the Windows version of OAM?
2. If you must run OAM on Windows to use AD for authentication, Is there some way to setup the Windows version of OAM as sort of an interface for our main OAM server running on Red Hat Linux to do the AD Auth?
3. Can it be done using some sort of an interface such as Oracle Virtual Directory to interface with the LDAP interface to MS Active Directory?

Answer 1

Hi David,
Answers in-line
1. Can it be done natively or would we have to run the Windows version of OAM?
You can run all of the OAM Servers on *nix, and simply point to AD as an OAM data source on the machine:port that AD is running on. There is no need for the OAM components to be on Windows.
2. If you must run OAM on Windows to use AD for authentication, Is there some way to setup the Windows version of OAM as sort of an interface for our main OAM server running on Red Hat Linux to do the AD Auth
As above, this is not necessary.
3. Can it be done using some sort of an interface such as Oracle Virtual Directory to interface with the LDAP interface to MS Active Directory?
Yes, this is entirely possible. Even though it is not necessary in your situation, it often provides more flexibility to front-end the user store with OVD, for example when adding/renaming Windows domains, or specifying specific branches for users and so on.
Regards,
Colin