In-Depth with Mac OS X Lion Server
by Andrew Cunningham on August 2, 2011 8:00 AM ESTLion Server’s main problem, from an IT person’s point of view, has less to do with the software’s functionality and more to do with Apple’s software support model. Lion Server is a good product that maintains most of the appeal of past OS X Server versions, but like the client version of Lion, it’s clearly a transitional product that makes many changes and foreshadows many more, and there’s less tolerance for that sort of thing in the server room than on the client's end. If your organization depended on something like the Print or QuickTime Streaming service in Snow Leopard Server, or the ability to join Windows clients to Open Directory, Apple decided that those services were obsolete and got rid of them; now you’re stuck having to find something else to do the same work.
That said, server administrators will be happy to know that, in spite of its deeply cut price and consumer-friendly distribution method, Lion Sever stacks up favorably against Snow Leopard Server. Most of the important services, chief among them Open Directory, are present, and are just as useful now as they’ve ever been. Unless you’re hosting a web server on your OS X Server, I don’t anticipate that you’ll hate Lion Server once you get it up and running.
For home users, my recommendation is less conclusive: for power users who like toying around with advanced software and for people who saw a particular service (like VPN, NetBoot, Time Machine, or File Sharing, to name the most user-facing) that will fill a niche in their home, $50 is hardly a steep price to pay for the functionality you get. That said, there are plenty of open source products out there to fill most of these niches, and if you really need something like this in your home, chances are good that you’ve figured something out already. Still, for many services, Lion Server brings OS X’s simplicity to the server level, and that shouldn’t be discounted.
OS X Server is most useful in a handful of different scenarios: the first is that you have a small network that’s in need of a full-featured but easy-to-manage and simple-to-license server product. The second is that you’re managing a network of any size that used to be all-Windows, but hosts a growing number of Macs (this is often the case in education, for example) - OS X Server knows that it’s going to be finding its way into a lot of Windows shops, and as such it integrates fairly well with existing Active Directory setups. The last is that you have a bunch of iOS devices flooding your network and you have no idea what to do with them - iOS management may be Lion Server’s ace in the hole. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you really ought to give Lion Server a try. At $50, there’s not much reason not to.
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Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Your Twitter was right, this really is endlessCharonPDX - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
It was that pesky loop that started on page 23 that circled you back to page 8. By the time you'd read page 23, you'd forgotten what was on page 8, so you didn't notice you were in a loop until you were at what you thought was page 157...B3an - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Very in depth article... but i feel you've wasted time on this. No one in there right mind would use OSX as a server. Apart from Apple fanboys that choose an inferior product over better alternatives because it has an Apple logo, but i emphasize the words "right mind".FATCamaro - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
For enterprise work, or a Windows-only network this is certainly true. For SMB, or even 500 mac/mixed users I think it could work if you can provide some glue to handle fail-over.Windows server is better for Office for sure as is Linux for web & applications.
Spivonious - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link
I can run a web server on the client version of Windows. It's just not installed by default.mino - Saturday, August 6, 2011 - link
Hint: for how many users/connections ....If it was THAT simple there would be no Web Edition, mind you.
AlBanting - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Same thing for client version of Mac OS X. I've done this for years.KPOM - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
True, for an enterprise user. However, a small business or tech-savvy home user trying to manage multiple Windows PCs, Macs, and iOS devices might well be tempted by the $50 price tag.If should be obvious by the price drop and the discontinuation of the XServe that Apple no longer intends to compete with Windows Server or Linux in the enterprise market. They are a consumer-oriented company, and released a server OS intended for a consumer market.
zorxd - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Tech-savvy home user will run a free linux distro for a server. Plus it will work on any hardware, not only on a Mac. Many use older PCs as servers.Also the Mac Pro is too expensive and the Mac Mini can't even have 3.5" drives which mean that it is a bad solution for a file server.
richardr - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
Actually, I have a real use case, though it may be a bit specialised for your tastes... non-computing departments of universities are full of people with underused desktops running Word, but also have other people doing analyses that take ages to run on their machines. Making them all Macs (you'll never persuade them to use linux) and wiring them up with xgrid and OSX Server is a pretty pain-free way of running my analyses on their machines without too much disruption to their lives...