Tom Yager at Infoworld reviews the xServe and it’s nothing short of stellar. If money was no object here at atmaspheric HQ (aka my house) I’d love to be running one of these babies from my pending equipment rack going in the basement.
A few of the finer points from the review:
I have tested, and continue to run in a production setting, two instances of Windows 2003 Server hosted by Parallels Desktop, running on OS X Server 10.4.8 on a 3 GHz Xserve. To skip to the punch line, it works, and it’s as fast as all get-out. Parallels does not stretch the truth when it claims near-native performance; Xserve is capable of knocking off any two-socket Netburst (Pentium 4) Xeon server going back at least two years. Compared to Xserve, those Intel boxes eat more electricity and give off more heat than they give back in capacity for work.
Parallels Desktop is a client solution, but I’ll tell you how to deal with that. Parallels also carries with it all of the caveats and shortcomings of host/guest virtualization–in which a full OS is required to support virtual machines–but Parallels and Xserve uniquely turn some of those issues into advantages.
Consolidating Windows servers with Xserve is an edifying and productive exercise. I’ll tell you how it’s going, and exactly how to make it work for your Xserve, or for any Mac that you press into Windows server consolidation duty.
Technorati Tags: Apple, xServe, Virtualization
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