Yesterday our newest system arrived at work, an Apple G5 Xserve and a fully loaded Xserve RAID. We spent this morning getting them installed in the rack, after carefully making sure that everything was placed just right. I’m very impressed with the hardware so far, definite bonus points for the cool factor. I’m still waiting for the two 1.14 TB (that’s terabyte, not gigabyte) RAID 5 arrays to finish initializing before I put it to any serious use. I’m hoping that getting it to enumerate users and groups from Active Directory will work without too much effort. If it does take any special voodoo I’ll likely write up the steps I used here. I’m also really looking forward to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) next year, it looks like it has a lot of feature that we’ll be able to make use of on our new Xserve.
I took a few pictures: Xserve G5 internals, Front Rack View (same pic as top right), Rear Rack View, Front Rack View In The Dark and Rear Rack View In The Dark. The lights are simple but impressive, I don’t think the pictures in the dark really do it justice. It’s like having a Christmas tree in our server room!