I could buy 1 XServe, 10 copies of VMWare, 10 copies of OSX Server, and run 10 servers on one piece of hardware without voiding my EULA.
Do you mean "10 VM licenses"? Some VMware versions do not limit the number of VMs that you can run - you need one license. Others have limits on the number of active VMs, so you'd need one VMware copy with a 10 VM license.
I'm probably not up-to-date on all of the nuances of vSphere licensing - so please correct any mistakes that I may have made.
My last company had 2500 Xserves. The guys I talked to that still work at that location have told me that they just spent 10 million dollars in upgrades 2 months ago.
You say "still work at that location" - did a bunch of them get pink slips on Friday?
In this case, Apple make money on the Macs which are supported in the Enterprise and .Edu environment by their Xserves.
With Apple's record revenues and profits, it really seems short-sighted to cancel the XServe's place as a "link" in the Apple OSX ecosystem.
Companies that are hemorraging red ink need to do that - Apple's bottom line is not affecting by low XServe sales.
hahaha "the end of Xserve is a knight in our back" classic
Note that the sender of the message apologized for any mistakes, since he wasn't a native English speaker. It's hard to be perfect in a handful of languages.
I don't think a lot of people here have any idea what a server does or what Enterprise units do with Xserves.
Have them look at
CNBC's graphics SAN using Apple XServe, and maybe it will help them realize why Mac Pros and Mini macs can't substitute for a rackmount system.
You cannot pretend to sell servers if all you'll have is a single model.
True - and something that I've said here several times.
People would be cheering the "death" of the XServe if Apple had said "We're killing the XServe, but announcing that Apple OSX Server will be supported on certified configurations of ProLiant DL360, DL380 and DL580 systems (both native and under Hyper-V and ESX)".
For those unfamiliar with HP servers, the DL360 base models are 1U systems roughly similar to the XServe (but can be optioned far beyond an XServe).
DL380 systems are basically the same, but in a 2U rack cabinet with more memory and PCIe expansion.
The DL580 systems are 4U systems with quad sockets (up to 32 cores), RAM up to 1 TiB, 11 PCIe slots, 8 hot swap disk slots with 512 MiB or 1 GiB battery-backed write cache, 4 gigabit Ethernet ports with embedded offload engines for both TCP/IP and iSCSI,....
Instead of destroying all cred with the enterprise - Apple could have embraced the enterprise even while shedding the XServe team.