XServe Arrives

The XServe arrived at the J-School today. Sysadmin is out of town, so it gets to live in my office for a while, bootstrap it through the transition from Wintel. Surprisingly large. Surprisingly loud. A work of art. Packed with software, ready to rock. In the rack. Dancing blue lights on the front of the box monitor dual CPU activity, which I haven’t seen since the BeBox went bye-bye. Afternoon spent RTFM’ing and exploring config options. Tomorrow we get down.

5 Replies to “XServe Arrives”

  1. Servers are supposed to be in server rooms. No need to buy expensive quiet fans.
    Scott if you have the time could you tell us what are the benefits of running os X server vs runnning plain vanilla os X ?

  2. Yeah, I’m not too concerned about the noise – it will be in the server room when I’m done configurating.

    OS X server has quite a bit built in that OS X does not. I’ll post updates later, and will try to work a list in there.

  3. We have one XServe at our co-lo facility and have just ordered a second to be added to it (to improve resilience against network outages at our office)

    From my perspective if you’re inclined to run a FreeBSD server platform, and want one with good graphical management tools, and remote monitoring tools Mac OS X Server is a fine choice.

    As far as the hardware goes since Co-location facilities charge by the rack unit 1-U (aka Blade) units are best and the XServe is right there in terms of build quality and performance with similar offerings from Dell, HP, Sun etc.

    I used to work for Digital’s Rackmount business (for seven years) and the XServe is a well put together and economical box.

    On the other hand as Scot said it’s darn loud, and since my company is an audio software company we don’t have them ‘lying around offices’ ! Makes testing audio fidelity and the like rather tricky !

  4. I was at WWDC a few weeks ago and they had one out on a table for a network game (Medal of Honor). I had never seen any pictures revealing the depth of the box and was shocked at how deep it is! I had pictured it about half as deep.

  5. Scott, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on OS X Server vs. plain OS X plus Webmin (http://www.webmin.com/). As much as I’d like to have an XServe, the sysadmin in my company has set me up with Linux-based servers, so I’ve been looking at Webmin to provide some graphical management tools.

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