Lion Server vs Lion

[FongMan]

Hey Guys,

Just looking some basic advice. I will be working with Snow Leopard and Lion servers in the near future and I am looking to buy a 27" iMac and I want to play around and learn the tools of Lion Server, but at the same time I love to play my games and run all my other social applications. What I basically want to know is, is it ok to put Server on my iMac and just use that as my main OS? Or would I want to leave regular Lion as my main and have like a separate partition for Server? I am a newbie to servers so any advice is appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[derbothaus]

More than ever Lion server is just an extra toolset bundle. It will not interact strangely doing anything you do on the client OS. In fact all you need to do is download the server pack and your client install is the server. btw. 10.7 server is NOT a real server imo. I still use 10.3.9, 10.5.8, 10.6.8. Will not be upgrading as the communication stacks are pathetic for enterprise use.

 

[talmy]

There are quite a few features in Snow Leopard Server that are missing in Lion Server, so if you are going to administer Snow Leopard Server installs then playing with Lion Server might not be fully productive.

 

[FongMan]

I see. I noticed that Lion Server has a ton load of complaints, so maybe I'll sit back and wait until they fix it up a bit...thanks for the info guys!

 

[admanimal]

Don't forget that you can install Snow Leopard Server and Lion Server as virtual machines with VMWare Fusion (and probably Parallels too).

 

[larkost]

There is one difference in Lion Server that would be detrimental to games specifically: they change the settings on the kernel from a more single-process focus to one that more evenly distributes CPU cycles across all proceses running. If you are running CPU intensive games, then they might run a little slower.

This is a good practice for servers, but bad for games.

 

[derbothaus]

There is one difference in Lion Server that would be detrimental to games specifically: they change the settings on the kernel from a more single-process focus to one that more evenly distributes CPU cycles across all proceses running. If you are running CPU intensive games, then they might run a little slower.

This is a good practice for servers, but bad for games.

Interesting. There must be a .plist write to toggle this?

 

[shardey]

There is one difference in Lion Server that would be detrimental to games specifically: they change the settings on the kernel from a more single-process focus to one that more evenly distributes CPU cycles across all proceses running. If you are running CPU intensive games, then they might run a little slower.

This is a good practice for servers, but bad for games.

I am curious to know where you discovered this information.

"Back-end platform changes include improved support for multi-core processors through Grand Central Dispatch which attempts to ease the development of applications with multi-core support, and thus improve their CPU utilization. It used to be that developers needed to code their programs in such a way that their software would explicitly take advantage of the multiple cores, which could easily become a tedious and troublesome task, especially in complex software. It also includes advanced GPU performance with OpenCL (a cross platform open standard for GPGPU distinct from CUDA, Dx11 Compute Shader or STREAM) by providing support to offload work normally only destined for a CPU to the graphic card's GPU. This can be especially useful in tasks that can be heavily parallelized."

I read that but it was in regards to Snow Leopard, non server edition.

 

[FongMan]

There is one difference in Lion Server that would be detrimental to games specifically: they change the settings on the kernel from a more single-process focus to one that more evenly distributes CPU cycles across all proceses running. If you are running CPU intensive games, then they might run a little slower.

This is a good practice for servers, but bad for games.

That's very interesting, I might have to go admanimal's route with the virtual server. Thanks a lot for the info guys!