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Apple is probably going Virtual here
by mbpark on Fri 5th Nov 2010 13:48 UTC
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Apple probably realizes that the server market is very expensive with a low ROI, and is dominated by several manufacturers, most notably Dell, HP, IBM, Supermicro, and Oracle/Sun.

To be very honest, their server offering just didn't have the serviceability of a Dell or HP server, or the years of built-in diagnostics and checks that you get from an IBM. There wasn't the option for RAID 6 on the hard drives, or the ECC RAM options that HP servers have.

They also realize that a good chunk of the server market is going virtual or blade to take advantage of the economies of scale and redundancy that VMWare and other virtualization solutions offer. To stay competitive, you need to develop either blade or massive (IBM's Nehalem-EX) solutions for virtualization. Apple has the cash to do this, but it doesn't make the money that a new iDevice will.

You can already run Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine (

If they release Mac OS X Lion server with VMWare support, this will actually get them more customers for OS X Server, since you won't have to buy a Mac server to run it, and you can put it onto your existing VMWare farm. Additionally, tools like Apple Remote Desktop Server gain redundancy. If you want a physical box, you can still buy a Mac Mini or Mac Pro. Granted, you're not going to have hardware RAID-6, ECC memory, or the ability to put in a ton of PCI Express cards, but it's fine for SOHO, especially since a good RAID 5 enclosure is cheap.

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