Should a small Mac shop gamble on Apple's Xserve?

This morning I was having a quick dose of MacSurfer when I happened upon the Low End Mac article, When to Pick Tux over Windows and Mac OS X.  The following comment got me to start writing before I could I could finish the article.

As a small office or workgroup solution, especially in a Mac-savvy shop, Xserves are great, but when you get into a mid-sized or large organization, the flexibility of Linux becomes more important than saving a little setup time.

Based on my experience, I think some caution flags need to be added to the statement.

To be very honest when the Xserve first came out, Apple didn't know what to do with it.  As I remember Steve's introduction of it was a little less than stellar.

Most of us at Apple were very glad to see the Xserve finally arrive.  We had been putting our customers who wanted Apple branded servers through some interesting gymnastics.  I can still remember seeing some "rack-mounted" blue and white G3s at a very important government installation.

Still Apple's server history with the exception of the AIX foray had a lot of Appleshare heritage.  Appleshare was a wonderful product in that you could put it on any computer and have a server.  In one respect it was both ahead and behind of its time.  Though Apple produced some "servers" they were mostly tricked out towers with Appleshare on them.

Appleshare was perhaps the easiest to use server product of all time. That was both its great strength and the biggest problem for Apple when moving forward with OS X as a server product and the Xserve as a dedicated server box.

The Apple field sales force received training on the Xserve.  As most people know the Xserve has components that are so easy to swap that even an Apple rep can do it.

However, we, Apple reps and managers, quickly figured out that even with great graphical tools, running OS X as a server was a whole different ball of wax than running Appleshare.

In fact where we had the biggest problems with Xserves were the shops that had been big Appleshare users.  It was a halo effect we didn't need.

The joke even ran around Apple that if the user had been a big Appleshare user, it should immediately disqualify them for Xserves.  When we were allocating Xserves during the shortages we even talked about shipping the first ones to Unix savvy users. Former Appleshare use as a predictor of problems was especially the case where the Xserve ended up in mixed environments with a Windows server on the network.

It turned out that administering an OSX driven server was something which few Appleshare users were qualified to do.  The nature of Appleshare was part of the problem.  It was just too easy.

I can still remember dropping an Appleshare server into a lab of Macs at the Business School at Virginia Tech in the late eighties or very early nineties.  Something like four years later I got a call asking me for the password since someone needed to change a setting.  The "server" had been humming along with no problems for all that time.  I kind of chuckled because I had heard tales of woe as the former Associate Dean had brought up his Windows server.

Now I don't doubt that a robust OSX server can last just as long.  I have an old G4 that has been running as my OSX server for many years.  Since I left Apple it hasn't received a new operating system upgrade. I think I did apply one that I hadn't taken the time to do when I was at Apple.  I can't even tell you what version of OS X it is running.  I don't even have a monitor and keyboard hooked to it.  It just runs but importantly I had some help setting it up from my son who administers six hundred Linux servers around the world.

It is interesting to go back to 2004 and look at my own efforts to get Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX all working on a network together.   One  of the posts in my first months of blogging was Heterogeneous Success.  That effort made me appreciate some of the pain CIOs must face when adding an operating system to their networks.

About a year later, everything blew up when I did a SUSE upgrade.  I had to be rescued by my Linux savvy son.  I wrote about it in SUSE Linux- OS X Networking. I went on to figure out that things breaking during a SUSE upgrade was just part of the upgrade. 

Eventually I wrote a post, The Curse of SUSE Linux, followed by one the next day, The Breezy Badger comes to the rescue.  It detailed my move to  Ubuntu Linux.  I was still happy with Linux in January of this year when I wrote, The liberal Mac and the conservative PC.

Actually I was really happy with my Linux until a power outage this summer really messed up things to the point that I had to reinstall Windows.  I needed Windows XP for my real estate job so it unfortunately was my first priority.

I eventually had to pull my SATA drive controller out to get Windows to work and unfortunately I still can't get the SATA controller going again. It's just too complex in Windows. I actually tried to install Linux using the onboard SATA controllers just the other night, but I failed.

When I had it working the first time I can remember going through this issue of hooking up a floppy drive when loading new hardware drivers. I don't even know what I did with the floppy drive I used three years ago.  That's just one of the Linux problems, and it is compounded by the backwardness of Windows. 

I would love to have my Ubuntu Linux back.  It's actually still there, my second dead drive had the cursed SUSE on it.

With that tale of Linux challenges, I might have proven the point about servers though certainly Xserves are far easier than Linux. While Xserves are easier, I imagine things like Active Directory might take some work.

Still I'm probably typical of many Mac power users.  I ran and administered some pretty big Appleshare networks in my day, but like many I still don't like to do terminal, and I have not taken and probably will never have the time to really learn OSX as a server.  I just want to get my work done.  I did Appleshare because it was very little work.  I think to run OSX as a server and do it right, you need to know what you are doing.

In the server world as it is in the Linux world, sometimes it helps to know what you are doing.

Back when I was experimenting with Linux, I was also taking time off after my exit from Apple.  I was the only person on the network so I could experiment.  That is a big difference from a production environment.

My advice is that if you want to drop a Xserve into your "Mac-savvy shop," do the training first and then get the Xserve.  You will save yourself a lot of heartburn down the road.  I think it is a fantastic product, but it isn't a toy and shouldn't be viewed as the next "Appleshare" even if you can get it running easily.

As to the rest of LowEnd Mac's article, I'll have to read that this afternoon, but I do have some computer recommendations of my own, Making a computer decision.

It's pretty simple.  Get a Mac with OS X if you want to do anything other than mail and browsing.  If you know someone who can do Linux and will provide some support, you can do that mail and browsing (and far more) on Linux.  Just don't try really high quality photos that require native drivers.

If you have to use Windows, my sympathies are with you, but lots of people use it and don't die from it.  Some of them are actually very productive using Windows.

On another tangent, if you didn't visit the Southern Outer Banks this weekend you missed some of the finest weather that I have ever seen.  There was some fantastic beach music at Swansboro's Mullet festival where I worked a booth for our real estate company.  It was enjoyable enough that I didn't even worry about my lack of Linux.  It was a lot more fun than the last time I visited an Apple booth at FOSE.

On a funny side note, I heard that Apple got the Xserve on the Federal GSA Schedule. I did a Google search for "Apple's Xserve GSA schedule," and found that one of my own posts, The Federal Half Swing, out ranks Apple's promotion of that GSA schedule on the web.

Since I have mellowed so much from living on the beach, I'll use Applepeels and help with the traffic to Apple's GSA link.  There aren't many "Mac-savvy shops" in federal so we don't have to worry about the Appleshare halo effect.

Speaking of the beach, the weather has been perfect for kayaking on the White Oak River.  Unfortunately last evening I had to stay in and write an article for Dropping Anchor, one of our local magazines.  I used NeoOffice and was really pleased with it.  I don't think I will bother with another Word upgrade. 

My only real frustration was in trying to do some research on the Internet and even Google has no good solution to our increasingly crowded pages.  The information glut there forced me to use a book which I seem to be doing more and more these days.  I think that is a good thing.

Comments

[PGE]

Where I work we have a Xserve humming, doing absolutely nothing. Management doesn't understand the versatility, the ease of use and managibility this platform has to offer. The company where I work at has always been a Linux & Windows enviroment. Around a year and a half ago we bought the G5 Xserve as a evalutation trial of the platform. During that period management was "exchanged" and interest in the Xserve from a management point of view died out. Today it just sits there in the rack, humming along. I've even played with the idea of asking management if they would allow me to buy it. I also suppose that saying to a management that only understand Windows and Linux (somewhat), that there is this platform from Apple that offers a combination of the two in many ways falls on deaf ears, now that Apple have become in many peoples eyes a consumer item and peripheral company.

I do agree though, that before getting an Xserve, you should learn what Apple's Mac OS X Server edition is and does. A bit difficult to learn through books though. I personally learnt the system by poking around in it and doing the old "hmm, what does this thing do... ahh it does that" kind of learning (the most rewarding and fun way of learning in my point of view).

Another thing to remember, is that Apple lags far behind in patching and updating the OpenSource applications it has embedded into the Server platform. In my point of view, Linux server distributions like RedHat, do patch and upgrade their applications a lot faster than what Apple does.

And, if you own a Mac today, and have some interest in learning, it is possible to build the components yourself from the OpenSource pool of projects and run many of the server applications found in the OSX Server platform in any standard version of OSX. Components that would be missing though would be Apple's own components and system management tools.