vSphere 5 - support for Apple Mac OS X Server

[#1]

Has anyone done an objective study comparing Xserve to Windows Server with
ExtremeZ-IP? Several years ago I did a study before purchasing Xserves and
found the data transfer rate to be about twice as high on Xserve as on
newer, more powerful raid-equipped Windows server. Also, new Xserves were
less expensive, considering licensing, and, at the time, smaller than
Windows servers. Also, at the time, they were more secure and "easier" to
manage.

At that time I did not have ExtremeZ-IP, and that may have made a large
difference in the speed of the Windows server, but also would have made
the Windows that much more expensive and complex.

The comparisons I have heard that praise Windows servers over Xserve are
subjective. Ignoring prejudice is often very difficult. Of course, if your
corporate IT offices say "It must be Windows..."

Now Casper is running so well on our Xserves and other Mac servers.

--
Karl Schoenefeld | IT Department
SGS St Louis | 1035 Hanley Industrial Court | St Louis, MO 63144
Direct: 314-918-3126 | Cell: 314-680-0359

[Matt]

We did extensive testing and found that our VM's were about 2 times faster than an Xserve and even more scalable and cost efficient.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

Need Help? Call the Help Desk at (310) 969-HELP (ext 24357) or online at http://itteam<http://itteam/>
Help Desk Hours: Mon-Fri, 6AM-6PM PST

[#3]

Matthew Lee <Matt.Lee at fox.com> writes: We did extensive testing and found that our VM's were about 2 times faster than an Xserve and even more scalable and cost efficient.

That's interesting. My experience has been the complete opposite. Our VMs (running on dedicated iSCSI array and a Dell blade chassis with oodles of RAM and CPU) have been horrendously slow and prone to a variety of other problems. I have an older Intel Xserve that can outpace any of our VMs for application speed and file sharing performance (AFP and SMB).

Everyone's experience can vary, it all depends on what setup you inherited and what you chose to do with what you had.

Gene Anderson
Systems Analyst, ACTC, MCP
Pembina Hills Regional Division No.7
Phone: (780) 674-8535 ext 6860
email: ganderson at phrd.ab.ca

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why. - Mignon McLaughlin

[ernstcs]

I'm just hanging tight to see what happens after WWDC. My servers are due to rotate this summer.

The whole server stuff in the Lion is a bit unsettling...

[tlarkin]

I have mixed experiences with enterprise support. A few times they
have helped me but overall I was not that impressed. The first time I
ever dealt with them, I had some connectivity issues with my Xserves. The enterprise support tech asked me if I had IPv6 set to "auto detect,"
and I said yes because that is the default situation. He told me to
log into every server and switch the IPv6 settings to "OFF" instead of
"Auto Detect."

So, I emailed him about 45 seconds later and said it was done. The
apple tech ripped into me, said I was wasting his time, and my time, and
my company's money because there is no way I could remote into 40
servers and switch every server to IPv6 off. He was rather rash and way
out of line. My reply to that was two lines:

networksetup -setv6off "Ethernet 1" send unix command via ARD admin to
all 40 servers at once....

Now please let me talk to your supervisor.

Now, there have been a few times they were very helpful and I found a
few known bugs in Open Directory and was able to file them with
developers after we discovered them. That is a good thing, but not sure
if we should pay for it.

-Tom

[jarednichols]

Your issue may be blades. We have our desktop backup infrastructure
running on blades (true hardware, not VMs) and they are horrendously slow.
Reboots of the two servers can easily take 10 minutes a piece. Total
garbage if you ask me. The new desktop backup infrastructure coming up
next week are R610s. No messing about this time.

j
-- Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[Matt]

Another great thing about being in VM's. We get actual SUPPORT. Something Apple never has been able to provide enterprises. Whenever we needed our Apple "Engineer" who was just a glorified sales rep to help us he would just try to sell us more product or give us a BS roadmap.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

Need Help? Call the Help Desk at (310) 969-HELP (ext 24357) or online at http://itteam<http://itteam/>
Help Desk Hours: Mon-Fri, 6AM-6PM PST

[#8]

Hi,

The applecare preffered support is very expensive, but the quality is incredible.

Sometimes I even ask for support on pure Casper suite issues, an they're always ready to help, up to replicating (non Casper suite parts) in their lab. I'm thinking about using PHD while MCX are managed by the JSS.

But I agree that the free support is far from great, at least in Europe.

Francois TIFFREAU
+41 79 216 37 37

[Matt]

The paid support IMHO is ridiculous. For that price we could hire another body.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

Need Help? Call the Help Desk at (310) 969-HELP (ext 24357) or online at http://itteam<http://itteam/>
Help Desk Hours: Mon-Fri, 6AM-6PM PST

[#10]

I agree that it's outrageously expensive, but we we've been able to get
patches, e.g. the pdf printing font fix, before release with our AC
Alliance plan.

--Jim

[Kedgar]

We've opened paid support tickets in the past that stay open for months with no resolution. We have resolved these on our own on all occasions. Apple has never given us a refund or a free support instance.

I hope Apple can get over themselves soon to provide a real enterprise OS.

Sent from my iPad

[Matt]

Thats why we cancelled our support. The support was terrible.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

Need Help? Call the Help Desk at (310) 969-HELP (ext 24357) or online at http://itteam<http://itteam/>
Help Desk Hours: Mon-Fri, 6AM-6PM PST

[bentoms]

I think I called apple once regarding a hardware issue on an x-serves raid card using one of the free incidents & resolved it myself without a call back from Apple.

Funnily enough some 5-6 years ago the manager of AppleCare UK (I think his name was Mick or Mike) popped into a reseller I was working at & advised me they have used my fixes in the past!!

So that's 9 years, 1 call.

But I mainly only use osx for asus, NetBoot, dist point filesharing & some basic web stuff

The rest i've gone to vendors for support. The best being Jamf & webhelpdesk.. The worst; retrospect, extensis & simplehelp.

Regards,

Ben.

[Matt]

JAMF has been amazing!

Apple's support is a bad joke.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

Need Help? Call the Help Desk at (310) 969-HELP (ext 24357) or online at http://itteam<http://itteam/>
Help Desk Hours: Mon-Fri, 6AM-6PM PST

[John_Wetter]

Not sure how we got to APpleCare Enterprise support from vSphere 5 but I guess I'll throw my .02 into the conversation… Our experience has been much like Tom's. We seem to be using it to find bugs for them or using services "in ways they haven't thought of supporting"… Though to me it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch that we'd want to do something like use a chained certificate in a service in OS X and have it actually recognize the intermediate certificate… So, we're paying for it to confirm it's a bug… If it was standard support they'd just tell you to insert the CD that came with the computer and call them if it's still an issue. Reminds me of Geek Squad now that I think about it… Our area SE really helps us out a lot, but I can only imagine how much of an island you'd be on if the SE wasn't really there to help with technical items.

Over the last couple years we've been migrating as much stuff as we possibly can over to our vSphere infrastructure. As soon as a service is ready to be retired from an old xServe, it's been going into Windows or Linux in a VM. Our JSS is on a fairly new xServe, but it will certainly be going into linux on our blade cluster in the next couple years. We rebuilt our storage and connectivity infrastructure last summer and since then our throughput is huge and maintenance and downtime have been near zero. We also have our xServes that push a lot of data like our Podcast Producer server hooked up to our EMC SAN which Apple tried to intimidate us away from doing. Luckily some great people here on this list are doing this same setup so I felt confident in doing it.

As far as Enterprise for Apple, with all of the different lists I belong to, this one has the highest level discussion…

John

--
John Wetter
Technical Services Manager
Educational Technology, Media & Information Services
Hopkins Public Schools
952-988-5373