For the past decade, we have had a small network of ~20 Macs and ~50 users who use remote home directories served from a Xserve in an undergraduate laboratory environment. (The applications reside on the client Macs, of course.) This system has been rock solid, requiring little maintenance or oversight. Equally importantly, this set-up prevents students from storing their work on the client Macs and from editing/deleting/moving important files. Because the faculty members who teach one of the courses that use the lab have been too lazy to update their handouts past Excel 2004 (!), the entire system is running an embarrassingly ancient version of Mac OS. For a variety of reasons, we need to upgrade to a more recent OS this summer.
The issue is the server: a XServe 2,1 (single 2.8 GHz quad-core Xeon processor) which can not be upgraded past Mac server 10.7.5 (Lion). There are two options:
1. Keep the Xserve, but upgrade it to 10.7.5 while updating all of the client Macs to Mavericks.
2. Purchase a new machine (which one?) to use as the server, run a newer version of the server software (which one?), and update all of the client Macs to Mavericks.
Our IT department has security concerns about #1 and is pushing us to move to a Windows server (fat chance!), but they have little experience with (and low opinions of) Macs.
Our server needs are quite modest, just serving the remote home directories. No e-mail, no remote updating of the client Macs. Additionally, the students are not storing massive data sets or editing video.
After reading posts in various forums, I have two concerns. First, I have read disparaging words about the capabilities of recent versions of Mac server, but I'm not sure that these limitations will affect us. Second, I have read disparaging words about the speeds of Mac mini based servers, but it is not clear why this option would be significantly slower than the six-year-old Xserve.
Which option would you choose and why? If you were to choose option #2, what hardware would you use (Mac mini? How much memory? SSD + Thunderbolt drive? Or Thunderbolt RAID?) and which version of the server (Mavericks server?).
Thanks for your thoughts and advice,
Melissa
The issue is the server: a XServe 2,1 (single 2.8 GHz quad-core Xeon processor) which can not be upgraded past Mac server 10.7.5 (Lion). There are two options:
1. Keep the Xserve, but upgrade it to 10.7.5 while updating all of the client Macs to Mavericks.
2. Purchase a new machine (which one?) to use as the server, run a newer version of the server software (which one?), and update all of the client Macs to Mavericks.
Our IT department has security concerns about #1 and is pushing us to move to a Windows server (fat chance!), but they have little experience with (and low opinions of) Macs.
Our server needs are quite modest, just serving the remote home directories. No e-mail, no remote updating of the client Macs. Additionally, the students are not storing massive data sets or editing video.
After reading posts in various forums, I have two concerns. First, I have read disparaging words about the capabilities of recent versions of Mac server, but I'm not sure that these limitations will affect us. Second, I have read disparaging words about the speeds of Mac mini based servers, but it is not clear why this option would be significantly slower than the six-year-old Xserve.
Which option would you choose and why? If you were to choose option #2, what hardware would you use (Mac mini? How much memory? SSD + Thunderbolt drive? Or Thunderbolt RAID?) and which version of the server (Mavericks server?).
Thanks for your thoughts and advice,
Melissa