@ntoxicator said:
So What is it that K12 environments use for user profiles and user data? Being that no user files are saved to workstations.
They teach users to save to network drives, and they learn quickly else they lose data. Very few environments have a true need for roaming profiles and they usually suck anyway.
There's also cloud storage type options too own cloud, Pydio etc.
Your over complicating this. Just because someone is getting GPOs applied doesn't mean the server needs to be right there. It's Minimal traffic, and most of those things you mention like printers aren't going to be changing often, it will sync the GPO locally to the computer and apply it, it will only need to update if the GPO gets updated in the domain after that