Thanks, i appreciate your feedback.
I would love to transition everything over to Mac OSX Server but unfortunaltley we have some complex web related services that we have developed using windows based API's and libraries that are driven by php (these are currently not available on OSX platform) so we are pretty much stuck with Windows for the http, mail and ftp services.
I take your points on security and heat. We actually have 6u at our disposal, its a bottom shelf of a rack and the power packs could go under the rack. The data center is climate controlled obviously, but more than that, they have air cooled racks with built in fans so I'm hoping this won't be a problem. From a security perspective we are subletting the space from a much larger company that owns the rack, in short we can trust them and its a locked cabinet.
I also agree the best option would be to run windows in bootcamp but XP PRO is not an option as IIS is not an enterprise version only accepts 10 inbound connectsions and we simply can't afford 2003 server, which leaves us with Win2k which we are more than happy with, but installing this on bootcamp is, i believe difficult and there are no firm drivers supported. I'd be interested in inforarmation on this tho' i've trawled the net and found little.
Getting back to the main point, running Win2k Server under Parallels, my primary concern is stability, so far in our testing the mini's seem fine, we have had one lockup in windows which seemed to be after installing parallels tools but nothing since, and nothing to lock the Mac OSX environment. I'm wondering if its worth having the tools installed at all, we can live without video card support.
The mac is set to autologin, and under sys prefs, accounts, i've set a login item to launch the alias for the win2k server virtualised environment, unfortunately this causes a dialog box error (sorry can't remember the actual error), i'm assuming its because the VM is trying to launch before Parallels services have started up?? I think if there is a delay it will launch.
I hadn't thought of using Xserves running multiple VM's, its a great idea, however would this not be limited to two VM's per server, 1 per ethernet port or is there a way around that?
Last edited: Mar 22, 2007