Xserve in PC Environment

[ramseyt]

Hello:

I am looking into buying an Xserve for out compnay. Its main purposes would be to serve as a file server. The thing I am worried about is the PC connectivity. Our company has only a few macs, and 20 or so Windows/Linux/Unix boxes. Mostly XP.

I need to make sure that this server will be easy to keep up, and have very few problems with connectivity.

If you have experience with an Xserve in a PC environment, I'd really like to hear how well it works.

I have plenty of experience with Mac OSX, but not much with server. Thanks for any help. Cheers! peace out.

 

[RacerX]

The main element to be concerned with is Mac OS X Server... which you don't really need to worry about. It serves Windows clients just as nicely as Macs. The cool thing about the Xserve is that it comes with an unlimited user license for Mac OS X Server (by far the best reason to choose it over anything else out there).

The best option would be to go to Apple's site and see what they have in the way of information for Mac OS X Server (you can download the manuals the last time I checked) to see how hard it would be for you (or anyone else) to work with. I just set up Mac OS X Server 10.2.6 for a client last week, it took all of about three hours to set up (including installing and updating the software). It didn't seem that hard, but it is hard for me to tell as I've been setting up Apple servers for quite some time now (including AppleShare IP 5.x, 6.x, Mac OS X Server 1.x and 10.x.x).