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Inside Apple's Leopard Server OS
An anonymous reader writes "Mac expert John Welch, author of the widely read OS X versus Vista comparison, delves into Apple's Leopard Server OS. He and Information week have on offer a deep dive into what's known so far about OS X Server 10.5, which will be showcased at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Welch weighs in on Leopard's iCal, Wiki, file, Quicktime, and mail services, along with Xgrid 2, Open Directory 4, and 64-bit capabilities. What does it all add up to? His assessment: Apple probably isn't aiming at 'big' enterprises; just the same, Leopard Server is shaping up to be a great SMB (small and mid-sized business) product. Welch writes: 'For about a thousand bucks on existing hardware, or for the cost of an Xserve, you get a really solid server, able to support Web services, collaboration, groupware, IM, and file services. You can run it with its own directory service, or as part of an Active Directory implementation out of the box. It provides some features that due to pricing and/or setup requirements, have traditionally been reserved for big enterprises — in particular clustering of both email and calendaring servers.'"
A comparison between Leopard Server and Linux would've been better, IMHO.
The one thing that has really helped MS in the enterprise has been that the sell an entire solution that all works together. Windows desktops sign into Windows Active Directory run by Windows Servers. Outlook connects to Exchange running on Windows servers with Kerberos AD logins. Office and Sharepoint getting along to create and maintain intranet content.
Apple has made huge inroads with solving the desktop issues of running Unix on the desktop. For the most part though I have seen either Linux or MS solutions on the server for file sharing and web serving and NIS/NFS and such. Even on the mac I would imagine that Entourage connecting to an Exchange server makes up a large portion of the Enterprise mail community.
If Apple can provide a cheaper end-to-end solution from the server to the desktop with LDAP directories, email, calendering, intranet etc - all preloaded on their server hardware and ready to go - then they have a real winner. Hell the cheaper licencing costs they can offer from basing on open-source can help subsidize their higher hardware margins to make this a comparable, if not cheaper, solution compared to something MS from the likes of Dell or HP.
If they really wanted to twist the knife in they should release some client software/drivers for Windows that make it just as easy to connect that to their servers and services as Macs to accomodate the need for having some PCs in a newly mac office.
Now is the time to do this as companies are faced with upgrading to Vista on the desktop, a new version of Office, and soon a new server platform. Most of this means new hardware purchases anyway. They might be able to just swoop in and offer a complete solution the likes of which linux has been unable to - all bundled with and guaranteed/supported on their own hardare as well.
Actually, it would be a Ferrari compared to a Lambourghini with a shitty paint job.
*nix (In my case, FBSD) lets me run a solid multi-service server on a box Apple would tell me to throw in the dumpster.
'all you need is newer hardware'. Now, where have I heard that one before...
I just bought my son an iMac and playing Lego Star Wars on it can throw it into a loop that only a power-off can break. OSX is pretty, and waaaaay better than anything from Redmond, but Cupertino shouldn't pat themselves on the back just yet.
If they get ZFS working, as is the rumour, and it's not buggy, then I think they may have a killer feature on their hands.
Even Microsoft shops might be inclined to test this out for a NAS box. One of the big reasons why people by netapp boxes is for the snapshot and snapmirror capabilities. With ZFS, OSX would have very similar capabilities for a lot less $$.
So it's not running in "big" enterprises. Then, in all seriousness, where is it running these days?
Well, are "big" enterprises all that exist? The answer should be hopefully obvious.
For our part, which is that of a large public research university, we have probably about 100 Mac OS X Server systems on campus here, and about 35 in our primary datacenter, not counting systems in compute clusters, which probably adds another 100 or so. (We have about 16000 Macs in general on campus, nearly all on Mac OS X.) Most are used for tasks where an Apple server is required or desired, like AppleShare file service, QuickTime Streaming Server, managing Mac OS X clients, etc. And yes, things like AFP and QTSS can be done on other platforms in various ways, but sometimes you want a seamless commercial-vendor-supported solution. The remainder are used as light to medium duty departmental/workgroup UNIX servers. In the latter case, they're usually picked because they're a lot easier for some folks to run than Windows Server 2003 or Linux; it's sometimes the difference between a small department or workgroup actually being able to reasonably run a server, or not. Some are deployed in departments with many skilled sysadmins who manage hundreds of Mac OS X clients, and use Mac OS X Server-specific functionality to do so.
Without full support for exchange, this is a wanna-be server. The exchange, outlook integration is still way better than the ical approach. With exchange shared adressess books, shared calendars and really good email integration works. The apple server "sort of" supports imap and pop... and a couple of poor open-source web integration alternatives.
Exchange alone is a good enough reason to go with Windows servers (and yes, I know some people have difficulty setting up exchange.)
Sounds fairly similar to my internship at Central Washington University. There was one full-time Mac guy for all 700-800 Macs on campus. A couple others would poke at them, but they'd toss anything more than a simple problem to the Mac guy. There were about 2100 PCs on campus...and eight guys to cover all of those. Do the math.
And you're right on in saying that OS X Server is so much more intuitive in it's design that 2k3. I had taken several classes in 2k3, but had never touched OS X Server when I first installed it on a test machine. I was absolutly amazed at how much EASIER it was to setup and maintain that 2003. There's no comparison. Microsoft just loves to spread shit all over the system so that you have to know it backward and forward to get anything done and wind up opening five windows/applications. Apple put 90% of everything within two applications. Server Admin for services, Workgroup Manager for Open Directory Management. Then there are a few more little apps for managing other miscellaneous things. If only Microsoft could design something that simple, but they've proven time and time again that they're utterly incapable of it.