0I do most of my work on Apple Mac OS X Leopard. Most of the time I’ll end up deploying it on some kind of Linux/Unix based server. I’ve always drooled looking at OS X Leopard Server and wonder how it would be like working on it.
To have a OS X Leopard Server running on a shiny Xserve is beyond my budget or any small businesses. Not to mention the cost of co-lo service on data centers.
Not anymore, Media Temple had announced the start of private-beta period for its latest line of hosting solution, the (xv) Xserve-Virtual. They are calling this “the world’s first VPS Leopard Server”.
VPS are virtual private server, mostly it runs multiple instances of Linux variant or Windows Server on a shared hardware resource. This are very standard for hosting options. Media Temple’s (xv) is one of the first to offer Mac hosting options.
This is very interesting, Media Temple is partnering with Parallels in bringing Leopard VPS hosting to the masses. By using “hypervisor virtualization” based solution, each virtual machine has virtual instances of all of the host’s hardware. It runs its own kernel image and its own copy of the operating system.
According to their FAQ, each XServe specs are 2 x 2.8GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors, 32GB 800MHz DDR2 ram, 3 x 300GB 15,000-rpm SAS with 16MB disk cache drives on a Xserve RAID Card. For the private beta period they are splitting the server in 1/8th partitions. Each virtual machine will be guaranteed 2GB of memory and two cores of CPU resources.
It’s like you are having a slice of the XServe. You can even login remotely and use it like a Mac desktop controlling it using both Screen Sharing and Remote Desktop. Anything you can install on a regular Mac, you can install on Media Temple’s (xv).
Apart form hosting websites, you can run iChat server, iCal server, use Podcast Producer or anything a XServe can do. Leopard Server itself comes with Apache 2, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat 5, WebObjects 5.4, 64-bit Java VM, and much more. Think of the possibilities.
Check out Media Temple’s Xserve-Virtual product page for more information.
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On a different note, I am actually thinking of switching all of my websites to Media Temple hosting.
I’ve been pondering on the decision to do so, as Media Temple’s pricing are much more expensive then what my current hosting company is offering, but Media Temple offers much more features.
I’ve to first figure out the best way to move all of my stuff for the migration.
