Saturday, November 6, 2010

Mac OS X Virtualisation

This evening I read that Apple are retiring the Xserve. I guess that's a shame as I always wanted to see more of OS X in the server space. I think that this will relegate OS X to the SOHO market; unless... Apple permit virtualised instances of OS X.

Permitting virtualisation would be a very smart move by Apple. Let's face it, unless you can run on OS as a virtualised instance then you're never going to be a player in the enterprise and in the elastic cloud.

Time will tell if Apple see the merits of virtualisation.

2 comments:

Peter Marks said...

Chris,

You make an excellent point. I read that they do allow MacOS X Server to run in a virtual machine.

I think particularly with virtualisation, the rack server market is a competition on price which Apple won't win. The XServes were a beautiful piece of hardware but only a few ever saw them.

Christopher said...

Thanks Pete - I didn't know about the OS X Server licence having been relaxed a couple of years back. That, and those conversations with VMware and Parallels, shows that Apple are indeed thinking toward virtualisation.

Now they have to relax the hardware constraints... This could be easier for them in a headless server environment.