We currently have 3 Dell rack optimised webservers in a local data center, however the center in now up to capacity and we have no room for expansion. The servers are running a lot of services between them including DNS Server, HTTP Server, FTP Server, POP & SMTP, PHP & MYSQL so we are cautious about loading them up with more services.
We are looking to use Mac Minis as enterprise web server running Mac OSX as the host and Win2k Server under Parallels desktop.
This may sound crazy but there is some method in the madness.
Firstly the Dells take up a lot of space and power, for each Dell we replace we can have at least 6 Mac Mini Servers in its place.
Secondly we can dedicate a single service per MacMini and if a failure occures we can redeploy quickly, so what we loose in Raid5 redundency on the Dells we mitigate with loss of one service (not multiple as current with Dells) and being able to fix and rapidly redeploy the OS.
We've been testing for about a week running Win2K and Mailenable Pro on two MacMinis with relative success. The MacMinis are setup to run Windows networking in Bridge mode on the wired ethernet and the host Mac OSX network is assiged to Airport, this gives us flexibility to connect using PCAnywhere on the Win2K OS and Apple Remote Desktop on Mac OSX, if a problem occures with Win2k and it crashes, theoretically we can connect on Apple Remote Desktop and restart the Virtual environment.
I was wondering if anyone else out there had similar experiences, clearly we could do all this in Bootcamp but its much easier and more flexible with Parallels, our only concern at present is future longterm reliability
I'd be really interested to hear constructive comments / experiences
We are looking to use Mac Minis as enterprise web server running Mac OSX as the host and Win2k Server under Parallels desktop.
This may sound crazy but there is some method in the madness.
Firstly the Dells take up a lot of space and power, for each Dell we replace we can have at least 6 Mac Mini Servers in its place.
Secondly we can dedicate a single service per MacMini and if a failure occures we can redeploy quickly, so what we loose in Raid5 redundency on the Dells we mitigate with loss of one service (not multiple as current with Dells) and being able to fix and rapidly redeploy the OS.
We've been testing for about a week running Win2K and Mailenable Pro on two MacMinis with relative success. The MacMinis are setup to run Windows networking in Bridge mode on the wired ethernet and the host Mac OSX network is assiged to Airport, this gives us flexibility to connect using PCAnywhere on the Win2K OS and Apple Remote Desktop on Mac OSX, if a problem occures with Win2k and it crashes, theoretically we can connect on Apple Remote Desktop and restart the Virtual environment.
I was wondering if anyone else out there had similar experiences, clearly we could do all this in Bootcamp but its much easier and more flexible with Parallels, our only concern at present is future longterm reliability
I'd be really interested to hear constructive comments / experiences
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