Lion 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.

With the Server Admin Tools so clearly on their way out and Server.app not quite ready to pick up all the slack, the direction that OS X Server is headed isn’t very clear. It’s a decent product today, especially for the money, but what will it be in two years? In five? This is the sort of thing that server admins, especially Windows server admins used to Microsoft’s longer guaranteed support cycles, worry about, and Apple isn't doing much here to allay those fears.

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.
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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