Rather than keep interrupting myself throughout the review to talk about using Windows with OS X Server’s services, I thought I’d lump it all together at the end for convenience’s sake. There's not much to say, so I'll be brief.

Open Directory: Past versions of OS X Server were able to serve as Primary Domain Controllers (PDCs) for Windows computers, which is to say they could provide Windows systems with authentication and permissions for users and groups, even though they couldn't manage many Windows settings. Lion's new SMB implementation removes that functionality entirely, which is going to hurt for people who rely on it. Interoperability with Active Directory domains remains as robust as ever, but it just got that much harder to get by with just OS X Server if you have many Windows clients to speak of.

Address Book, iCal, iChat, and Mail: All of these services use open protocols (or, at least, protocols that are supported by several non-Apple programs), so you can access them from many different products across many different platforms: POP and IMAP for Mail, CardDAV for Address Book, Jabber for iChat, and CalDAV for iCal. You may not get quite as polished an experience as with the built-in Apple tools, but you should still be able to interface with your OS X-using colleagues (and, of course, the services that offer web clients will render fine on PC browsers).

File Sharing: Lion's new SMB doesn't affect file sharing with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 clients - it all works as intended.

VPN: Properly configured Windows computers should be able to make full use of OS X Server’s VPN service, but check out this Apple support document for some caveats and configuration details.

Web and Wiki: Naturally, as long as you have a Web browser and appropriate permissions, you can access and edit Web and Wiki pages from Windows just as well as any OS X user. Note that you may have the best experience using Safari, but I didn’t have any problems using Chrome or Firefox in my testing.

Other Apple-tailored services - NetBoot, Podcast, Xgrid, Time Machine, Software Update, and others - won't do anything for your Windows clients. If you’ve got a mostly Mac network with a few Windows users, or if you intend to use OS X Server mostly to manage Macs and Windows servers to manage Windows, then OS X Server should work well for you; if you just have Windows clients, though, or if your Mac-to-Windows ratio is high enough, the removal of PDC functionality makes it hard to get by with just an OS X server.
Xgrid and Xgrid Admin Apple's Server Hardware and Server Monitor
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  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    Upgrading OS X is not much of a pain, as Repo says. Plus, it's practical to skip at least every other upgrade. So, upgrading every four years (2 + 2) at $60 isn't a big deal and the improvements are worth it.

    I especially appreciate Expose', Time Machine, Spotlight, and Quick Look and use them regularly And every Mac user has benefitted from Quartz GL (uses 3d graphics card to speed up screen draws).. There have been myriad "invisible" or subtle improvements as well. See Apple's "Mac OS X" section for details.

    Four years between OS upgrades is not bad, as I said. Longhorn was supposed to come out about 4 or 5 years after XP. Microsoft just had eyes bigger than its stomach and it was delayed. But Windows 7 was worth the wait. Especially features like the display compositor + aesthetically pleasing UI + improved security (and no more yellow speech bubbles popping up all the time)

    Ex2bot
    Automated System Process
  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    BTW, Expose's successor is called "Mission Control."
  • Sahrin - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link

    a reduction in advertising, if you guys are going to do all these paid reviews for Apple.
  • Johnmcl7 - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link

    It's getting a bit of a joke these days that anything with the Apple badge will get a news article, preview, in depth review the moment it's out dwarfing everything else which barely seems to get a look-in. I get that Anand likes Apple stuff and if I don't I should go elsewhere but I like the non-Apple reviews when they do occasionally get published.

    John
  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    It's no joke. Check Anand's mailbox some time*.

    Ex2bot

    *Crazies, please don't mess with his mailbox.
  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    I know for a fact that Apple employees stuff money into Anand's mailbox*. Lots and lots of money. They use $20s and $50s straight from Jobs' car, who burns them to light his cigs.

    Ex2bot
    Currency Calculating Mac Fanbot

    * Anand, I don't really believe this. I was kidding, as I'm sure you've figured out. Actually, I'm sure they are $100s, not $20s and $50s. After all, he's a Billionaire.
  • the_engineer - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link

    Thanks for this great in-depth look at Lion Servers new & continued functionality, I learned a lot reading this. However, I'm still very confused at where XSAN fits into the picture. As a storage power-user I've used software Linux raid, semi-hardware windows raid (Intel, Highpoint), and I've lately dabbled into ZFS because it seems like it's really got everything I could ever want as far as straight storage capabilities are concerned (I'm running a raidz6 with 6 750GB drives currently running on Nexenta). I'd really like to put Lion Server on a mac and install a generic SATA card and add 6 3TB hard drives and do a great big raid5 in a mac pro, but am very confused as to whether or not this will work. I was very hopeful that Lion Server would integrate 'software' RAID5 or similar functionality, but it's not clear anywhere whether it does this or not. Simply put, Do I still need to buy a dedicated raid5 card to have a redundant array of inexpensive disks on a mac or am I missing something still?

    -Looking for a great user experience AND a ton of redundant storage
  • HMTK - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link

    Why not set up a NAS with iSCSI or NFS ?
  • the_engineer - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link

    LONG story short, geting a deidciated NAS box means spending more money than ought to be necessary at this point (I have an i7 desktop and a core2 desktop, both capable of running Lion, Windows, FreeBSD, you name it... Just fine, as well as plenty of vanilla SATA ports & cards available). I'm Trying to weigh all purely software options available to me, with ZFS/BSD sitting on top of the heap for storage features but OSX sitting on top of the heap from a usability standpoint. The longer I look at it the more likely I am to end up running one huge 20-drive ZFS based NAS under FreeBSD but was trying to avoid getting to this point.
  • HMTK - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link

    If you put it on the network you can access it with all decent OS's. I've got a little HP mini proliant just for that.

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