“From there I can run whatever operating system I want. “Though it won’t run Windows, to my surprise, Xserves can actually run VMWare ESXi flawlessly,” wrote Nick Neely, another satisfied Xserve user. It’s a creative and convoluted solution that is nevertheless “a heck of a lot more reliable and stable than swapping out 10 plus-year-old hardware every time an HDD goes belly up.” “Want a Mac VM? It’s relatively rare compared to Linux around here, but some of our students do, and for that you need Apple hardware, and we have little room for anything we can’t rackmount or that we can’t put fibre channel and 10Gbps Ethernet cards inside.”Īlex Clay, a software development manager at Suran Systems, uses an Xserve to virtualize Mavericks so that he can virtualize Mac OS 9. “We have five 2009 Xserves still in use, all running ESXi 6 as a cluster,” writes Elizabeth Harvey-Forsythe, a senior systems engineer at the MIT Media Lab.

The Xserve’s number of processor cores and large banks of RAM made it a good fit for virtualization. But the Xserve’s hardware had a few unique things that Apple’s repurposed consumer desktops couldn’t replicate.īecause virtualization conserves power and simplifies server replacements, upgrades, and administration, it became a popular way to consolidate hardware around the turn of the decade. For many of those simple tasks, a quad-core Mac Mini with two hard drives got the job done while keeping stored data safe-ish. MacOS Server started getting simpler not long after Apple discontinued the Xserve. In our Sierra review we asked those of you who are still using Xserves to get in touch, and plenty of you did. Even though Apple never offered true server-class hardware again, that doesn’t mean the hardware isn’t still out there doing its job. And while Xserves running El Capitan will keep getting security updates for a couple of years and the current build of the macOS Server software still runs on El Capitan, the hardware will soon be completely buried.įor a few years after the Xserve’s death, the company offered Mac Pro and Mac Mini Server configurations ( PDF) that could do some of the same things, but even those options eventually disappeared.

20 of this year, Apple lowered that coffin into the ground when macOS Sierra dropped software support for the systems. Instead, the company started pushing server customers toward Mac Pros and Minis.

Apple put the final nail in the Xserve’s coffin in January 2011 when it officially stopped selling rack-mounted servers.

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