We run ~1000 RHEL7 workstations, accounts are from AD (man sssd-ad
), and students have access to their windows (CIFS) homedirs using autofs + their kerberos ticket. We use bcfg2 for our configuration managment, but there's no reason why we couldn't use Puppet or Chef, it's just what we chose 5 years ago.
I wouldn't trust NFS for homedirs unless you're using NFSv4 w/ sec=krb5. It would be trivial for someone to plug a laptop into the network port, forge the MAC and IP of the computer that was plugged in there, and then have full access to every single user's NFS volume if you aren't using sec=krb5.
I see it rarely suggested, but bcfg2 has a standalone mode, as described in this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.bcfg2.devel/4717. Configuration is 'described' in (very readable) XML.
I have not used this on the Pi, but it seems to be fairly lightweight, and might give you some direction. http://bcfg2.org/.
Edit: Saw this one a few minutes after looking at BCFG2 -- http://www.heiho.net/synctool/