In-Depth with Mac OS X Lion Server
by Andrew Cunningham on August 2, 2011 8:00 AM ESTOne thing to mention in a review of Lion Server is the state of Apple’s server hardware. As you may or may not remember, Apple discontinued its Xserve line of rack-mounted server hardware back in January, and slightly modified two of their desktop models to fill the void - Lion Server can be installed on any Lion-capable Mac, but these are the systems that are actually shipped with it installed.
The first, the Mac Mini Server, adds a quad-core processor and second internal hard drive to the standard Mini configuration - you can certainly use this drive as additional storage space, but in a server it is best used to provide data redundancy in a RAID array with the other drive. A price of $999 (the same price, remember, as the Leopard Server software by itself back in the day) makes it a hard proposition to turn down for small-to-medium businesses or academic institutions, and a small group of them can provide enough power and redundancy to comfortably serve most services to many devices (rack-mountable shelves that will house up to four Minis are cheap and readily available).
The Mini Server became easier to recommend after its recent refresh, where it gained the Sandy Bridge architecture and its quad-core processor in one fell swoop. Bump it up to 8GB of RAM (aftermarket, if you’re smart - friends don’t let friends pay $200 for a $60 memory kit) and you’ve got yourself a decent little server box.
The second is the Mac Pro Server, which can pack enough processing power and memory to host OS X Server and a couple of virtual OS X Servers if you wanted. It’s a little harder to recommend, since the performance gap between the base Mac Pro Server configuration and Mac Mini Server configuration is smaller than it once was, and since the Mac Pro would take up so much space in a rack. The Mac Pro is still waiting on its 2011 refresh, which should bring both newer processors and (if the rumors are to be believed) a new, smaller case (since the current case design has remained largely the same since the Power Mac G5 came out eight years ago). This, perhaps combined with a price drop, could make the Mac Pro Server a better choice than one or two Minis.
The main drawback of Apple’s current server hardware is lack of monitoring tools - the Server Monitor tool that continues to come with the Server Admin Tools download requires Lights Out Management (LOM) support in the hardware, and the XServes were the only Apple computers that did this. If you want to know things about your server’s temperature, RAID status, and the rest, you’ll have to rely on third-party tools.
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HMTK - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link
OK so you can definitely run a Mac OS X vm on vSphere 5 but only on Apple hardware. What a joke! Probably Apple idiocy rather than a technical limitation.Spazweasel - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link
Apple is a hardware company. OS/X and iOS exist to make hardware sales possible (thus the cost of development is included in the pricing for Apple hardware, something the Apple haters conveniently overlook) Allowing the running of OS/X on non-Apple hardware reduces Apple hardware sales, so they don't do it."Idiocy"? Yeah, sure, whatever.
HMTK - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link
Not allowing Mac OS to run under a hypervisor on non-Apple branded hardware won't help them either. Or do you think a halfway decent IT-department would put a desktop machine or a hard disk posing as a server in a data center? They'd rather pay a few 100 € more for a license if they could run it on ESXi/XenServer/Hyper-V and reliable hardware.Spazweasel - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link
Apple makes its money on the desktop, not the server room. I doubt it's worth the effort. OS/X in the server room is a niche product, and Apple know it; it's much more suited as a workgroup/small office server, and those environments do not have ESX or Xen installations.Apple has no incentive to support OS/X in a VM, and plenty of reasons not to. Really, I don't see why this is a surprise.
HMTK - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
I'm not saying it's a big surprise, I'm saying it's stupid. why not make good manegement tools for their iOS available in a way that companies can integrate better in their infrastructure?You might be surprised as to how many small shops are going the virtualization route. Even if you have only a single server it makes sense in the long run when the time comes to replace the hardware. Just import the VM on the hypervisor on the new hardware and you're done.
GotThumbs - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
This is an interesting article and I enjoyed the depth of detail. As a builder of my own systems for years, does the use of this software bind you to using only a ready built Apple system? It seems Apple is slowly trying to create a close proprietary system where you have to use apple hardware and apple software. I know their are hackintosh systems but it seems its still going to be quite a bit of effort and so far seems to be a waste of time for me. As the article mentions, there are lots of alternatives available. Apples MO seems to be offering zero options for using outside sources. Apple consumers are being channeled to Itunes and the Mac App Store for all purchases. I'm personally not a fan of that trend and have no intentions of bowing down to that kind of control. I can see where the general consumer who has very little technical knowledge is quite accepting of Apples controls as its a very simple and somewhat brainless system packaged in a slick looking package.GrizzledYoungMan - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Or is it still something we're all going to pretend works, when it very clearly doesn't out in the real world (If it worked, why would DAVE exist)? I'm referring here to the myriad of permissions issues and oodles of useless garbage sidecar files that pop up after a few days of operation in a mixed environment.Haven't read the article. Probably won't. Sorry. Apple is a joke at anything that designing anything that doesn't fit in your pocket/surrogate vagina of choice.
I get this feeling, deep in my angry muscle, every time some imbecile waves around his iThing, raving about Apple's genius, while I'm thinking about all the time that has been wasted trying to get OS X desktop clients to do things that have worked out in the real world for years now.
blueeyesm - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Not in Lion, as Samba moved to GPL3 licensing.http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/insi...
GrizzledYoungMan - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
You know what's wild? I should actually be excited they're moving to a new standard - the NAS' I often recommend to clients support SMB2, and see useful performance gains from it.But then I read "Windows networking software developed by Apple" and my heart sinks. Realistically, what are the odds this is going to work?
Honestly, I don't really blame the design teams over there so much as a closed corporate culture that both ignores the feedback of their customers and denies any complaints exist.
They're really missing out on the sorts of improvements that most big software developers make using the information gathered during large, open betas and the like.
repoman27 - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
As the article you linked to points out, since version 10.2 Mac OS X has shipped with Samba, an open-source, reverse engineered version of SMB 1.0. With Lion, Apple dropped Samba and added native support for SMB2 while maintaining the ability to connect with SMB 1.0 machines as long as they use UNICODE and extended security. This means Mac OS X 10.7 can no longer connect out of the box with some SMB 1.0 or Samba machines (which it had done for the last 9 years), but it does have full support for SMB2.As for GrizzledYoungMan's "oodles of useless garbage sidecar files," it's not like Mac users have any use for a thumbs.db file either. Just hide the metadata files, or don't allow write permissions on the folder if you don't want to see that kind of stuff, but these types of files are most likely only going to become more prevalent as time goes by.