Anyone using an Xserve?

[digitalpoint]

Is anyone using an Xserve for their forum? Currently ours is running on Red Hat, but I'm thinking of putting it on an Xserve at some point.

I know the specs for vBulletin says it works on OS X, but is there any functionality that will be lost? (Assuming the same version of MySQL and PHP)

- Shawn

[digitalpoint]

Okay... anyone running vBulletin on any form of OS X? The Xserve itself seems nice because it has very good disk I/O (165MB/sec read and 139MB/sec write) and can have lots of memory (8GB).

I'm starting to outgrow my Red Hat machine, so I'm looking around for something that I (hopefully) won't have to upgrade again.

If not an Xserve, anyone have any suggestions for anything else?

[bjornstrom]

We are using two Power Macintosh G5's for hosting 99mac.se - largest Macintosh site in Scandinavia. Both are running the latest version of Mac OS X Server with PHP 4, Turck MMCache, MySQL 4 and Apache 2. The performance is great but we are hoping that Tiger Server will add some new features that are missing in Panther Server such a "running services" menu, better ARD, Apache 2 integration with server manager and more.

Servers:

- The bigger one is a dual 2GHz with 3.5GB RAM, 2x160GB SATA RAID-1
- The smaller one is a single 1.8GHz with 1.5GB RAM, 2x160GB SATA RAID-1

We recently installed a Xserve G5 2x2.3 GHz and a couple of Mac Mini's (we call em iServes) into our serverrack.

Pictures:
http://media.99mac.se/bildreportage/xserve-mini-rack/

(text in Swedish tho)

[Zachery]

Tis beautiful

[cirisme]

Pretty cool. What are you using the minis for?

[Zachery]

I would personally guess as image servers or somthing similar.

[eva01]

*sheds tears* oh that is so gorgeous.

[bjornstrom]

Pretty cool. What are you using the minis for?

We actually got three of those right now - we don't use them ourselves for production but rent them to mac owners who wants a dedicated server with 100Mbit internet connection. They are pretty slick, only problem is the 2.5" harddrive without RAID - we do a backup every 4 hours tho.

In the long run you save money by getting real servers, in case of hardware failure you are much safer with hardware RAID and where you can change stuff even without booting.

[cirisme]

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

[bjornstrom]

We celebrated 5 years online recently and the guest at our party signed our new Xserve G5 :)


Trying to understand the Apple rackmount kit.


The rack is getting pretty crowded and it took us 30 minutes to clear some space for these new servers.


The first Power Macintosh G5 has left the rack. We save 14U replacing them with Xserve's.


More Xserves coming next week! From the top: Xserve G4 1.33, Xserve G5 Cluster node, Xserve G4 2x1.0, Xserve G5 2x2.3, Mac mini 1.25, Power Macintosh G5 2x2. To the right a Acuta 4 RAID-5 in the background and three Cupertino Pleiades Triple-Interface backupdisks.


Closeup of the Xserves.

[digitalpoint]

Nice... they are good boxes. Especially for web servers.

There are some issues with MySQL that don't make them great MySQL servers though (memory fragmentation issues)...

http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2005/10/mysql-problems-on-mac-os-x-server.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2005/12/mysql-memory-fragmentation.html

Now with an open MYSQL Bug report:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=13578

Just something to be aware of if you are going to use them as DB servers.

I'm moving DB functions to SuSE Linux Enterprise on blade servers myself (in fact the blades happened to arrive today (http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2006/05/dell-blade-servers-are-here.html)).

[bjornstrom]

We have experienced performance related problems when running MySQL on Mac OS X and we have moved to a new setup:

Xserve G5 2x2GHz 2.5GB RAM with Apache/PHP.
HP Proliant 2x2.8GHz Xeon 3GB RAM, RAID-10 SCSI 15k, for MySQL. OS: Win2k3.

We are currently running two pairs like this for our vB sites. Combined with the APC cache (99,9% hit rate) and the "dedicated server" settings for MySQL we have reached very good performance.

[digitalpoint]

You might be careful as your site grows... APC starts causing segfaults in Apache when you get very high load (for us it was when we were serving out more than 500 PHP hits/second). It's not specific to Mac OS X though, as I've seen other people report the same thing for Red Hat and FreeBSD with APC.

I've since switched to eAccelerator, which works absolutely flawlessly under the most extreme loads on OS X.

There was some weirdness with eAccelerator configuration (before compiling) setting the "best semaphore" to sysvipc instead of fcntl though (I ended up editing the config.h file before compiling), but once you get it compiled, it's great.

[bjornstrom]

We´re up to 11 Xserve's now: :D

[bjornstrom]

I've since switched to eAccelerator, which works absolutely flawlessly under the most extreme loads on OS X.

Sounds great!