[just_a_someone]

According to the 'Transition Guide' that Apple released, you can stand 2 Mac Pros on a shelf side by side, using 12U of rack space.

Sounds practical to me :-|.

[illumin8]

If Apple wants to be taken seriously as a server software vendor, they would be far better off to allow virtualization of OS X Server only and let people run it on HP/IBM/Dell/Oracle/Sun x86 hardware.

I can buy an 8 socket 8 core x86 server with 64 threads and an additional 64 virtual threads, and 1TB of RAM that only takes 5U of rack space.

[nkassis]

"If Apple wants to be taken seriously as a server software vendor'

I really think they don't want to. They've never cared about anything related to businesses using OS X for servers or even good desktop management.

[illumin8]

You're right, but there are Pro users that want a server to farm out Final Cut rendering and other such tasks. That was the target market for Xserve.

A market still does exist for Apple servers - a small one. This market would be best served by virtualization of OS X Server.

[masklinn]

> If Apple wants to be taken seriously as a server software vendor

They don't. If they did, they wouldn't drop the xserve.

> they would be far better off to allow virtualization of OS X Server only and let people run it on HP/IBM/Dell/Oracle/Sun x86 hardware.

This suggestion is utterly moronic. Once again, Apple is a hardware vendor. OSX exists for the sole purpose of selling Apple hardware. The only reason they sold (and still sell, see Mac Mini Server and Mac Pro server) OSX-based server machines is to support whole networks of Apple hardware.