In-Depth with Mac OS X Lion Server
by Andrew Cunningham on August 2, 2011 8:00 AM ESTLion Server’s main problem, from an IT person’s point of view, has less to do with the software’s functionality and more to do with Apple’s software support model. Lion Server is a good product that maintains most of the appeal of past OS X Server versions, but like the client version of Lion, it’s clearly a transitional product that makes many changes and foreshadows many more, and there’s less tolerance for that sort of thing in the server room than on the client's end. If your organization depended on something like the Print or QuickTime Streaming service in Snow Leopard Server, or the ability to join Windows clients to Open Directory, Apple decided that those services were obsolete and got rid of them; now you’re stuck having to find something else to do the same work.
That said, server administrators will be happy to know that, in spite of its deeply cut price and consumer-friendly distribution method, Lion Sever stacks up favorably against Snow Leopard Server. Most of the important services, chief among them Open Directory, are present, and are just as useful now as they’ve ever been. Unless you’re hosting a web server on your OS X Server, I don’t anticipate that you’ll hate Lion Server once you get it up and running.
For home users, my recommendation is less conclusive: for power users who like toying around with advanced software and for people who saw a particular service (like VPN, NetBoot, Time Machine, or File Sharing, to name the most user-facing) that will fill a niche in their home, $50 is hardly a steep price to pay for the functionality you get. That said, there are plenty of open source products out there to fill most of these niches, and if you really need something like this in your home, chances are good that you’ve figured something out already. Still, for many services, Lion Server brings OS X’s simplicity to the server level, and that shouldn’t be discounted.
OS X Server is most useful in a handful of different scenarios: the first is that you have a small network that’s in need of a full-featured but easy-to-manage and simple-to-license server product. The second is that you’re managing a network of any size that used to be all-Windows, but hosts a growing number of Macs (this is often the case in education, for example) - OS X Server knows that it’s going to be finding its way into a lot of Windows shops, and as such it integrates fairly well with existing Active Directory setups. The last is that you have a bunch of iOS devices flooding your network and you have no idea what to do with them - iOS management may be Lion Server’s ace in the hole. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you really ought to give Lion Server a try. At $50, there’s not much reason not to.
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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.