If you are following my private or the Klein2Podcast twitter account, you’ve maybe read about my plan to move back from the new DELL R210 server to Apple hardware.

Here’s my “evil secret plan”:

You may ask: WHY?

That’s a good question. First of all, I must say that I like the hardware of the DELL server. It was fast, pretty cheap for a server of this class, BUT it contains one thing that bugged me: I had to run Windows Server or Linux or UNIX. That’s ALL not very compatible with our clients, which are (as you can see in the diagram) all Macs. While fighting with the server and testing out different things like VMware ESXi, Linux and again even OpenSolaris, I was everytime overwhelmed. Also, it took too much of my time that I urgently need for my company stuff (means: working for my clients instead configuring the LAN).

With these things in mind, I decided that the idea from Danny Choo (scroll down until you see the Mac Minis ) is the best, also for me. Simply getting 2 used Mac Minis, attaching some external storage and having fun with an easy OS.

No way would I want to create a “REAL” server with Mailserver, iCal-Server etc. on my own, but for making the sharing easy, I used Mac OS X Server 10.6 that I had laying around for the “Business” machine. The “private” machine is running on a regular Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.(4).

I’m still a bit shocked how well the machines are working. Even if the stuff is +1year old, they are behaving very well and are doing their jobs better than expected.

Of course, everything has to fit into the new rack. Here are some photos of how I’ve managed to get everything in. It’s a great rack and it was really fun to put the stuff into the rack. Yeah I know, it’s not really meant to sit in a 19″ rack, but that’s ok

I’m very sure you’d like to see more photos, so don’t hesitate and check my flickr photos: http://dkle.in/rackjuly

Ciao
Dennis