At work we have about 7 servers, quite heterogeneous but all running AMD64 architectures, which we would like to join and manage from a single machine, preserving the fact that all of them can also be used as desktop computers.
The basic idea is to have all servers share configuration (i.e. installed software), accounts and one partition devoted to a shared filesystem.
Is this posible with Ubuntu? So far we have had to install Ubuntu and manage it on each individual computer, but it is a mess to keep up with upgrades and allow people access to different computers. Does Ubuntu and any of the tools it provides (MAAS, Juju, etc) help in any way here?
P.S.: We would like to stick to free software here. We cannot afford pay for maintenance and also this is a private network sitting behind a firewall.