I have a Xeon Xserve running Mac OS X Server 10.4. I'm very much not a fan of Mac OS X Server, and would prefer running plain old Mac OS X 10.5 on it.
But I'm worried that I'd lose some features in the "upgrade", such as:
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Fan control. The Xserve is loud, but I doubt it's running all fans at 100% all the time when running on OSXS. Does OSX have the same fan-control smarts as OSXS?
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Hardware Watchdog. A nice Xserve feature is auto-restart even in the face of a Kernel Panic. Will this critical feature still work under OSXS?
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Server Monitor. Mac OS X 10.5 doesn't come with this application. Can I just copy over the binary from my OSXS 10.4 install? Worse case, can I buy a copy of OSXS 10.5 and copy it over from there?
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RAID Utility. This one I'm less concerned about since this seems to come with Mac OS X 10.5. I'm assuming it can do the same things.
Can anyone address on these concerns? Are there other gotchas I've missed?
Best Answer
There are very few differences between Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.5 Server under the hood. It's almost exclusively the bundled apps and the extra server tools. Fan control should work fine in Mac OS X 10.5, but you'll lose auto reboot in the case of a kernel panic and you'll lose Server Monitor. Stick with Mac OS X Server, but upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5.
If price is your concern, buy a 10-client of Mac OS X 10.5 Server now (the number of clients only matters for AFP & SMB/CIFS client connections) and take advantage of the up-to-date pricing when Snow Leopard is released this fall.