---
title: WWDC2003 Session 621
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2003-621
---

# WWDC2003 Session 621

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en good afternoon so my name's Doug Brooks I'm a product manager for server hardware at Apple and I'd like to talk to you a little bit today about the point xserve so you know xserve has had an exciting year the product is just a little over one year old we've had a major update to the product back in February and an edition of the compute node in March and so like to talk to you a little bit about the deploying xserve so before we dive right into X or would like to position a little bit about how extra face and a broader IT sent and it what's interesting is you know since we've launched the xserve and actually in our customer research before we launched extra we had an opportunity to talk to a wide range of customers and really help understand what some of their challenges are deploying servers and there were a lot of constant themes that we were shared with us and you know things like operational costs continually under review I mean the old story of you know doing more with less or doing a lot more with a little bit more is a continual challenge availability of service you know the the incredible speed and worldwide presence of the Internet has made time irrelevant which means that you know opportunities for downtime are swimming few and in between so availability of service in a variety of ways has been continually challenging and important the point in time is shorter so time to ramp up systems and get hardware installed and networking available and services up and running is you know medium be done again and less and less time systems / administrator increasing and I'm sure many of you relate to this you're having more services more servers more physical boxes being deployed and you need to manage more and more of those resources and server utilization is high or having servers work more do more and they maintain that utilization rate again continual challenge so you know the big question becomes what does Apple has to offer in this space you know besides that we think is a pretty neat one you box and so I think it's important to understand what you know what we see is our value proposition in the IT market and it to address these specific issues so from a cost perspective we think we have a great offering from a hardware and software and software licensing perspective with low cost of hardware low cost of storage and a limited client license is built in and hope you've seen in some of the other sessions the ability to you know host more users at a much lower cost have more storage available on your network is a big value that Apple can deliver with our server products from availability well you know we design these boxes from the ground up to be servers and so that means reliability and availability both in hardware and software and that's you know something that we strive with these products the format time you know X service design and we'll talk more about it here to be easy to deploy easy to manage and be very easy to you know roll these systems out and so again that is a key design goal that we build into these products to provide that and finally server utilization our goals here to provide power flexibility at a lower cost so tremendous amount of services built in tremendous amount of resources and the hardware to deliver upon these requirements so what are we going to talk about today so quite a number of things first of all you know I think it's important to answer you know the Y xserve question so we'll touch on that speeds and feeds you know xserve has been around so we're not going to spend an incredible amount of time about the hardware feature set but I think it's important to provide a high level architectural review what we really see are the server value features in xserve and that we have to offer and of course then deployment what things can we look at to make it easy to deploy these boxes both regarding physical hardware type issues software type issues and we'll have a number of things that will touch on there and a very important get asked this a lot is backup strategies so we'll touch on the latest unavailable backup strategies for Mac OS 10 and mac OS x server and finally resources where we can point you to for more information on all these topics so let's start with why xserve so we fundamentally believe that xserve is the easiest way to deliver very powerful network services been able to put a tremendous amount of technology into a 1u rack mounted server form factor with you know incredible storage capability and one of the real advantages of xserve is the mac OS x server software having a powerful open source foundation with very robust server services or later on top of that but with fantastic remote management capabilities very core to the design we think we've offered you know many of the same features that people love about Linux open source great system resources but integrated all from one one vendor one place so one-click install gets you all those features built and ready to go and again powerful open standards-based services hopefully you've attended many of the IT tracks this this week and it's been a continual theme in open standards technologies built in best of breed and finally more capabilities at less cost really trying to provide a very value oriented platform with lots of services and capabilities so quick review of the hardware so you know xserve again was designed from the ground up to really be a phenomenal server platform this is not a a g4 tower stuck on its side and a smaller enclosure really optimize this platform to be a phenomenal server platform so you know that means a couple different things so you know first of all it's a rack-mounted form factor so being able to sit in industry standard racks I like to joke it's an industry standard rack it's not the 20 inch wide you know Apple special rack industry standard rac1 you serve that does mean 1.75 inches not to so you know from industry standard be able to fit that in with existing network year existing server gear right in your and your data center environment we you know look at the hardware we've packed a tremendous amount of technology in a very small amount of space so single and dual g four processors dual Gigabit Ethernet each on their own pci interface for bandwidth and throughput for hot plug hard drives using a hot plug architecture that's based on ATA hard drive which is interesting when we first launched texture of a lot of people ask questions about however now you know because so much in the industry is beginning to utilize ATA hard drives in this space not nearly questioned as much and we think we have a great proposition with performance and storage capability with the storage architecture in xserve and and of course pc i explained ability to 12 inch pci slots 64-66 delivering very high performance especially when connected to external devices like our own xserve raid really leveraging the pci performance of becks serve what I really wanted to highlight though is the the architecture of X serve because again this is really optimized you know to be a server and what that gives us what it really means is a lot of storage bandwidth and a lot of networking bandwidth and so being able to offer features like dual Gigabit Ethernet again each on their own pci interface which gives us the ability to really keep those channels moving data very efficiently without them competing for bandwidth on the system and the storage architecture again on its own pci bus very high speed pci bus each hard drive has its own independent ATA controller so quad independent ATA controllers what that gives us is tremendous scalability as we have storage when we add additional hard drives to the xserve not only we adding raw capacity to the system we're adding more storage bandwidth in the system so especially when we look at high bandwidth applications where we're striking drives together very strong scalability of storage in the box and of course the ability to go external to again to devices like our extra raid for additional storage capacity and of course we put this in a we think is a real phenomenal rack mounted enclosure so again designed for ease of access xserve slides out on Rails okay so that right within the rack it slides open you have access to all the key components everything's on thumbscrews or standoffs for quick and easy rug repairability any component can be swapped in roughly a minute so a very serviceable design we couple that with unique programs like our applecare spares parts program where you can have spare kits right on site so should you have any component problems they can be swapped out in sight very quickly and easily a lot of flexibility and we'll talk more about the the rack mounting options that we have with the xserve the other real key thing that many people overlook when we first look at exxaro is you know the dedicated hardware monitoring that's built into the system again being a rack mounted server platform these things are designed to you know live in a datacenter live in Iraq you shouldn't have to as a system administrator you know spend your time physically in front of the machine we want to minimize that as much as possible and that means being able to provide health and status information about the server at all time so we actually have hardware built in on the logic board of the xserve that is pulling data about the entire system and delivering that to our remote management tools so we're monitoring things like the voltage is coming off the power supply of each rail the speed of the blowers temperature in two different locations of the box status and throughput of the ethernet interfaces status and health of the hard drive modules matter of fact we're doing things like reading the smart data off the hard drives been able to do you look for performance and health data and look for what are called pre failure analysis looking for things that are indicating a future problems we then wrap that data all up into our server monitor management tool which has the ability to perform email notifications and things like that so our server monitor tool is a Coco application that can monitor one or more exurbs in a single interface you can see several servers being monitored he you have status indicators for all the key components so you know green lights are good for all the key components yellow is a warning condition red is an error condition and you can drill into any of those components with one click to get detailed information if you want to know the exact temperature of the top unit in Iraq very easy to do that what's really interesting about this tool is that the data hopefully some of you have the opportunity to go to some of the mac OS x server sessions where they talked about the management protocol we use the same architecture with server monitor this application is actually just reading xml data and presenting it to you in a GUI interface but that xml data is available on the system we've actually had customers be able to extract that data and use that in their own monitoring tools and so that's been been very handy from that perspective looking for more automated you know scriptable analysis of this information so just to review of the major xserve configurations to highlight the new compute node we actually currently offers three configurations of our excerpt so the first two are our you know quote-unquote server configuration single and dual processor you know single hard drive up to 720 gigabytes of internal storage cd-rom vga standard and of course Mac os10 server unlimited client license to highlight the new compute node that we introduced in the March timeframe is a machine specifically optimized for compute intensive tasks this is primarily in response to customer requests for an excerpt streamlined for things like compute clustering and again if you're in the compute cluster in session you saw some of those units in a demo up on stage so this machine is streamlined for that two processors single hard drive single Gigabit Ethernet the onboard ethernet no video no cd-rom because you don't want one of those in every single unit and also much lower price than the standard dual processor configuration what's interesting about this unit is while we targeted for compute clustering tasks it's also been very popular in any kind of computational intense application it's been very popular for things like web application servers where you don't need a lot of storage on the nose good it's it's getting data from external databases or things and so it's been very interested in those kind of deployments as well and of course you know just to touch on it again you've heard a lot about Michael Westen server and the various sessions this week but you know what really wraps up xserve and the credible package is the mac OS x server software and so in actually in this session everything I'm going to be talking about is focused on the currently shipping mac OS x server software jaguar server i'll touch out the very end on some features that benefits xserve deployments from the Panther server at the very end but again with with X server you know mac OS x server unlimited client license in in the server configurations with a wealth of services built right in ready to be deployed with out-of-the-box incredible package so what I really wanted to get into now in more depth is the deployment issues and have a variety of topics from rack and power and networking out to software installations high availability with IP failover backup and also a few pointers on key command line tools that I found system administrators might not know about that are very essential you're not familiar with some of the special tools that we provide just wanted to highlight those for you at the end so wanted to start off with rach since you know x serve as a rack-mounted server one of the first requirements is that you have a rack somewhere to put this in and so while every now and then we find an xserve you know out on a table we kind of shy away from that it's not designed for things like stacking on top of it or monitors on top of it we highly discourage that kind of deployment this thing's built for racks and we have quite a number of flexible rock deployments xserve can support both two posts and four post racks and so to post is really handy we see this a lot in in environments that have a lot of networking gear already installed and can install the xserve in a existing to post rack it's a center mount bracket that mounts on the side of the box it's kind of cantilever mounted in the in the unit I want to stress though and this will come up there in a minute is that if you ever plan on mounting an extra of raid with xserve we really recommend you go right out and get the four post rack and I'll touch on that again it from a for post-rock perspective one of the key things to understand about xserve is the depth requirement again we packed a tremendous amount of technology into a one-year form factor and it's a 28 inch deep unit and we recommend it be installed in a rack that's 30 inches deep or more yet show the bracket support up to 36 inches of rack depth right out of the box with no additional brackets but that 30 inch depth is a standard server depth and we we really recommend you look at racks that meet those requirements is a much cleaner easier installation and gives you the best environment now with the slot loading xserve we did add based on customer requests additional short brackets that give you the ability to mount xserve at 24 26 inches deep this was a big request for people who had existing a bee wax typically with audio and video gear that were shorter and so now with the slot load extra we have the ability to mount that it mounts very nicely the issue there that you just have to understand is that we stole from you know we don't get any shorter with that so you still have about two inches hanging out the back and a 26 inch rack so if that's a rope reot you can configure that in that standard racking that works great you know just to highlight that we include in the box you know all the various mounting hardware english and metric threads and one of the things that we did based on customer requests with the slot load xserve is we included the cage nuts that get mounted into the square hole rack so that you have everything you need right in the box so a couple couple suggestions and recommendations based on feedback and experience first and foremost you know just a reminder extra braid you know being a little bigger unit a little heavier unit is designed exclusively for for post-rock there's quite an extensive mounting range but it's important that it gets put into a four-post rack and so if you're planning on adding one or deploying them together start there very important little suggestion you know people are deploying several of these bottom-up works better and then top down I like to suggest letting gravity do some work for you it's real important you know to get the units in nice and squarely and if you let gravity just take care of the positioning for you they stack up very nicely plus once you get the first one in the rest go in quite easily so a little suggestion there with the slot load xserve we also provided a installation template it's actually a metal bar with some holes in it and we highly recommend you use this for your final installation of the lid in the unit what happens is you place this on to when you attach the lid into the rocky place the bracket on and you use that as you tighten the screws into the rack what happens is because the the lid is what you actually mount in the rack if you over tighten or under tighten the screw the lid can be slightly deformed in or out making either very very difficult to get the xserve in or and sometimes it can be actually a little loose and they'll be complete too much play in the rail and so this bracket was designed to make sure everything's perfect and with that bracket being used tighten the screws in and the unit slides right in just perfectly and so that as a little suggestion that we've added with any slot load xserve find a little thing is that with a slot load xserve we've added a CD protector bracket to the slot load CD bay and we really recommend you keep that protector on during the entire installation process I know a lot of first things people want to do is pull it off and look at the fascia of the unit but it's best if that be left on it prevents any deformation in the the fascia on where the sweetie goes into the machine if it's a torque too much you'll see a slight bend in that unit as cosmetic it doesn't affect the CD going in or out but you know we like to make them look as nice as possible in the rack and so that protector provides that strength during installation so I'm going to talk a little bit about power and environmental requirements you know we have a nice advantage with the power powerpc g4 processor in that the power requirements and heat output compared to other competing processors in the when you form factor our tend to be much lower and so I wanted to highlight that for you here the power supply is actually rated for the worst possible condition with an xserve so we actually rate the power supply at 3.6 amps 345 wats that includes margin on top of that in reality it's pretty challenging to on a single processor system to use more than about 200 watts in the system and for most typical configurations and in the dual processor pretty challenging to use more than 350 watts so this provides some additional guidelines when you're actually planning for example ups deployment on the loads that are needed we actually document specific configurations and power and thermal output requirement in our knowledge base so there's actually if you go into the K base k based on info at apple com search on xserve and BTW you you'll find these specs actually has flushed out in a lot more detail we do several different kinds of configurations and give you that as example for power and heat output and that gives a gives you some scaling guidelines they're based on a room requirement and obviously one of the challenges is that when you have a lot of these in a small space you want to make sure that the room stays within operational temperatures and to prevent overheating now we do have system monitors tracking temperatures but and you'll get alerts if the systems get too warm but you know proper environmental is important for any kind of server environment so just what does this translate into UPS loads wanted to give you some examples these are two common APC UPS is a 1u 1000 UPS ideal for one or two Xers and then a bigger APC three you three thousand UPS that can handle several lectures so just to give you some guidelines of the single one ux u PS give you a 30 minutes of power to a typical configured xserve that would be a dual processor xserve and around 15 minutes of kind of the worst case scenario fully loaded fully maxed out xserve okay for comparison the bigger x the bigger bait APC UPS or x6x serves a typical configuration will give you around 15 minutes of power and for a fully loaded worst-case scenario around five minutes of power so still plenty of time to do proper shutdown procedures worth noting also that APC has a software to connect these eps is for proper shutdown behavior networking so you know networking is critical in a server environment and and of course that's one of the main reasons why we provided dual gigabit in that out of the back of the machine so xserve standard configurations come with dual Gigabit Ethernet one built in on the logic board and one in our AGP PCI combo slot so one of the big advantages of the xserve and that configuration is that we have this combo slot it's really our third pci slot and this can take either a 4x high-performance AGP video card or the way we configure it for standard server configurations is a pci ethernet card and so that gives you a second high performance copper interconnects for gigabit ethernet the pci ethernet card actually is a slightly superior card from a performance standpoint we found it to be about ten to fifteen percent in performance greater than the onboard ethernet and what's interesting is that that is the actual ethernet card we used in some of the benchmarking for example that set the web bench record that we we did when we benchmark tslot low-tech serves so a very strong performance in that ethernet card and we tend to recommend people use that as a primary interface for serving serving clients a little note though a remote setup software and we'll talk more about that in a minute prefers or expects to use built-in ethernet okay so we recommend what you do is use the built-in ethernet to bring you system up and configure it and use the pci you committed your primary interface for your services okay now get a lot of questions about people looking for optical cards who want to connect optical Gigabit Ethernet to the system and they're actually several third-party solutions apple doesn't offer a card off of our store but there are several key third-party solutions in this space to provide that solution asante has a be the most popular card the 1000s X gig index card and i just recently discovered a vendor who has mac OS 10 drivers 3m has a line of optical cards called volition that have mac OS 10 drivers and so that has a two optical Gigabit Ethernet solutions and finally get asked this a lot with the the slot loading next serve the software that we ship mac OS x server 10 24 had a new feature in it called IP over firewire and so when you added that to your ex serve a new en tu would often show up in the system preferences pane for ethernet and that's actually IP / firewire matter of fact and Panther server it actually will show up named IP over firewire to make it a little more obvious what that is had a lot of people wonder did their their server suddenly grown and you can head in her face so this is really exciting IP over firewire especially on the slot loading nexor with having dual 800 megabit firewire on the back we can use this as an IP interface my effects we can chain down the rack with very inexpensive firewire 19 29 pinned cables and connect a bunch of Xers over IP over firewire this gives us an ideal third interface for for things like management replications and IP failover watch you talk about its use and IP failover and a little bit it's a it's a you know think of it as a built-in interface that you can now very easily use for those environments and it's very handy for that it delivers very good performance and you know just works like an ethernet interface from that perspective you know one of the benefits here that lets you keep your high performance copper gigabit ethernet ports available to serve clients on on your network and use this as a back channel for management and things like that one thing I did want to mention with IP over firewire is that when you have those machines connected together you want to be very careful about plugging other devices in so when one of the things the challenges is that now that those machines are connected together they're firewire buses now across those machines and one of the great things about x servers we have a firewire port on the front like to brag with our friends and power mac we were the first one to put the firewire on the front of the machine so you put that ipod in and plug it into the front you actually have all the machines that are connected with that firewire bus we'll see it concurrently and so it could actually mount on several machines which would be less than desirable so just something to be considering when you are using IP over firewire to be very careful plugging and additional devices non IP over firewire type devices into that firewire bus because it is a shared bus SNMP one of the features that xserve introduced in mac OS x server actually with the original lexer with 10 15 is SNMP SNMP capability and this has been built in since then and there's a great capability really wanted to call out and highlight because we have a lot of customers and in heterogeneous environments who want to take advantage of SNMP monitoring and plug it into tools like open view or inner mapper or some of the neon tools that we bundle on the slot load xserve and this is built in and the only challenges that is deactivated by default and so you get to turn it on you actually have to add one line into SD host config and just say snmp-server equals yes and that will activate the SNMP stack and it will start up automatically from then on out it's worth noting that in and jaguar snmp-server equals no is not in the default script you actually have to add it as a new line a lot of people look can I just change no to yes it's actually not in the in a host config script you have to go in and add it and then of course highly recommend you run the SNMP comp tool which actually allows you to plug in system specific information you know hostname contact information email address all the things so that when you connect to it / SNMP you get some meaningful information beyond network statistics and other valuable information that SNMP provides back if you're not familiar with SNMP or configuring it we have your great man pages built in our implementation of SNMP is actually based on net SNMP and so there's a great resources of course the net-snmp webpage that I'd point you to for more information about specifics about the mids and configuration above and beyond what we provide them the man pages wanted to talk now about software installation you know one of the great things about mac OS x server on x servers we have a variety of ways to configure the machine and have because of the headless nature of rackmount servers have a lot of new tools that we've built for extra and other environments to make it easy to deploy these machines in in the rack our goal is that you know if you want to hook up a monitor and keyboard to an xserve great go ahead it should work just like you would expect but we want to make it really easy to you know take this extra brand new out of the box rocket power it up and just configure it remotely never ever having to connect a monitor and keyboard and make that a really great user experience and we think we've done that so I wanted to highlight the various methods of configuring the software on xserve before I get into that I wanted to highlight a new feature that was in the slot load xserve that we introduced with a slot load xserve which we call our front panel boot menu on the original xserve the system identifier button the button with the triangle on it when you powered up the Machine and held that button it was like holding down the ctrl or it forced the machine to boot off the CD ROM and that was great for for the same kind of operation but what we found out is that you know a lot of people wanted to do some of the other things that you could do with this what we call the snag keys or the special keys on the keyboard and so we've actually added more features in the new of the new slot load xserve to provide this and what we've actually implemented is by using the Late Show the two rows of eight blue LEDs and the button on the front is implemented a very simple boot menu on the xserve so what you do is when you power up the Machine you hold down that same system identifier button for us a couple seconds and what it will do is it will actually flash and you'll get a single blue LED that will count out across the eight LED and now when you press the system identifier button it will indicate those LEDs from one to eight from the right to the left and is how you count that and each each LED then has a special meaning and when you've selected the number LED that you're looking for you then hold down the system identifier button for a few seconds you'll see the indicator count up and down and when you release it it will go ahead and follow that action and so what we have now is a seven commands that can be implemented right on the front of the extra without any additional keyboard or other interruption interaction obviously the first one is boot from CD so you press that if there's a CD and the drive it will reject it very handy and when you put a CD in it will now boot attempt to boot from that CD if it's a bootable CD the second one is like holding down the NT it's the net boot command net food will touch on this a little bit netboot is a great way to mass deploy servers you can use it for you know network configuration have an image of the Machine automatically or in cluster environments you might choose to netboot the entire cluster for a single system image so you can do net suit right from the front of the machine again no keyboard needed the third light indicates boot from the internal hard drive and so what it will do is it will start in Bay one which is the leftmost hard drive and attempt to boot from that and then boot from try to boot from the drive two three and four so it will basically search an internal drive base for a viable boot hard drive if you select option number four it will actually attempt to boot from a device other than the built-in device that you've already chosen previously so if you want to actually you know troubleshoot your built-in system boot drive and you want to instead boot off an ipod or a firewire drive or something you can select this option it will scan and boot from the first available device that it finds it's also worth noting so i don't think i mentioned it elsewhere in the slides you can actually boot off of our extra raid and we actually have people who are doing that so very handy to be able to boot off a fibre channel option number five it turns the xserve into target disk mode now this is extremely extremely powerful we'll talk more about this in a sec with target disk mode to basically turn the xserve temporarily into a FireWire hard drive and you can plug that into your powerbook and and mount those hard drives right over firewire like it was a little little firewire hard drive what's unique about the implementation on next serve is that we've actually allow it to mount all for hard drive bays okay so you can have for hard drive bays and rather than just booty showing dr 0 or bay one i should say it will mount all the available drives out through firewire option number six of course is that the pier am magic command and finally option number seven is the equivalent of booting into open firmware this is very powerful for people who want to kind of get under the hood and give very specific commands to the firmware we've also added some intelligence to this if you don't have a keyboard plugged in it automatically activates the serial port on the back as a console so you can go right into the serial port tell it to boot off of a specific device to do specific troubleshooting that you might want to do at the open firmware level which is fortunately very very rare but when you want to do it it's very easy to activate that so one of the high like that because we'll use that in context of some of these examples so you know I want to take the first and easiest implementation of deploying exersaucer which is the the easy plug in the keyboard and mouse method and you know this is you know works just like you would expect you know plug it in boot from the CD install it off you go just like you would any other machine very simple very straightforward when you have the ability to have a keyboard and mouse handy to be plugged in what's also interesting about this approach is using the target disk mode function we can install using the xserve really like it was a target hard drive so this is really great you can take your powerbook turn your foot your xserve into a hard drive plug it in install from your powerbook onto the xserve like it was a boot drive and actually install mac OS x server through that method using your powerbook or other other firewire capable macintosh system as your screen and keyboard and actually host processor at that time so a very very easy way to deploy and reimage and manipulate the software on rex serve it's also really handy in the rack because what you can do is you can take one configured xserve mount a second-deck serve in the rack with a short little firewire cable in the rockies in the front amount of firewire ports and just move data from one extra to the other over firewire target disk mode is actually now you can clone one machine configuration to another over firewire rather trivially with fire water target disk mode so this is a really handy feature you can use in these environments the next thing I wanted to talk about is remote configuration user server assistant this was a specific feature we added to support headless installation of the software for xserve but yet provide a really simplified and powerful user experience so it still provides a graphical user interface the way this works is that you again using the front panel mode can boot the system from a CD from the install install CD that comes with xserve you boot that up and if you've ever wondered why it takes a little bit longer to boot mac OS x server cds on the ex service because it's creating this remote hosting capability what it's actually doing is booting the environment creating making networking available and then what you do is run a utility called server assistant that you run on a remote host powerbook for example that's plugged into the network on the same subnet you find that xserve remotely using a rendezvous type technology and then configure the system through the same server assistant you would see as if you are on the machine locally to give you an idea what this looks like what you do is this is from a client machine you run for on your powerbook the server assistant and it comes up and asks you what do you want to do do you want to configure a remote machine or install a server or reinstall the server software so you can actually do a complete reinstallation in a headless environment so in this case we'll reinstall or install mac OS x server software it will then scan your local subnet using again the same protocol as rendezvous looking for machines on that subnet and it will list their current IP address their mac address if you can validate the exact hardware course that you're talking to and what it thinks its host name is and these will refresh you might see one you might see a dozen servers depending on how many are in configuration mode and I'm going to stress that this is only available when it's in this booted but booted configuration load this isn't something that you can connect to to an xserve at any time obviously for security reasons you don't want to make it easy for anyone to reinstall your server software so once you find this machine that you're looking for you click on it continue and it will prompt you for a password and because the machines in a in a remote configuration mode the machine could be in an unknown state what we've decided to use is the authentication is actually the hardware serial number of the machine so you actually use the first eight digits of the hardware serial number and that's actually why we put the serial number on the back of the machine and on the front inside of the machine if you just slide open the xserve about two inches you'll see a little printed serial number tag on the inside of the machine as well as on the back making it very easy to get access to information so you enter the first eight digits of the serial number to authenticate it will continue and you then continue through the assistant just like you would locally you know language boot device option packs you want installed ask you for your IP address all the questions you would answer normally now we're being done remotely it's sending those remote commands over to the machine in an encrypted fashion basically using an SSH type encrypted communication session the machine will configure it soft reboot and then it's in exactly a known state that you can login to as the administrator with server administration tools and configure all your your services from there on out it's a very very powerful and simple user interface to to do this remote server assistant mode the other the other approach I wanted to talk about briefly is network install so one of the abilities you have to do and this is really handy when you're deploying a large number of xserve in a in a given environment is to use the network install capabilities that's built into mac OS x server so basically using a server as kind of a hosting server that can host an install environment for or other machines on the network so you can create a disk image using the network image utility that's in 10 to server we highly recommend if you're doing a server install that you use version 10 to five or later the network image utility that ships with ten to five or later note that you'd the system software that you're installing on the machine doesn't have to be necessarily at that revision but the utility that creates the disk image needs to be there are actually some specific server of things that were addressed in 10 25 version he then so what we'll do is you run you run this utility will actually ask you for the server software CD you place that in the machine and off you go to create that image you then can never eat that off and it's just like bleeding from CD and have that administration capability so here's a look at the actual utility itself being able to create an install image it will create that image in off you go you can make that your netboot Network image that's available the the last thing I wanted to talk about is probably one of the most powerful tools for extra of deployment which is a command line tool called ASR this is a tool that allows you to basically take an image of a server that can be completely configured and blasted on to other machines it's very fast very efficient and can be very flexible in the way you use this machine so you literally can take a known boot image slop it in one Bay of an extra take a blank drive in the other Bay of the image pull up terminal type in ASR you know target source volume target volume some optional flags depending on if you want to use them for both options and erase of options are highly recommended and off you go it will clone that dry that's now perfectly bootable Drive you can stick in another excerpt and bring up in a completely known environment now what's really amazing about ASR is that you have the ability to host these disk images that become the image that you're blasting onto a server from a web server so imagine this you can create a pristine image of every server type of server the in your environment this is the web server this is the DNS server this is a file server create a disk image of it whether it be for backup or for replication purposes put that image up on a web server and using the HTTP URL to that disk image as the source image blast that from a web server onto a onto a hard drive very very amazing capability very fast very efficient last night oh the other thing I wanted to mention is that there actually some unique third-party Apple cut products coming that help this environment this is a prototype of a product that a company called extreme Mac is working on and will be a shipping shortly this is a apple drive module device that has firewire on the back should be able to take this device plug it into a powerbook of power mac and read and write to apple drive modules for configuration take this out stick it in there next serve and a very easy way to deploy images and software onto an xserve drive from a host machine to look forward to products like that providing new options for you as well so one of those things I wanted to talk about kind of moving topics here is availability so mac OS x server has a unique architecture in intent to server called IP failover that provides a way to have two servers kind of provide a master-slave failover environment for availability and this is built into a jaguar server requires a connection be connected between a private IP connection between two servers for use as a heartbeat so what happens is we have two servers on a common private network that are passing a heartbeat between the two of them saying you know I'm alive are you alive and this is ideal for using IP over firewire again a small firewire cable between two servers with IP over firewire gives you the perfect connection for this kind of environment it has the ability to failover so once server goes out the other machine takes over and then fail back so when the other machine comes back up have it resolved it services back and this is ideal out of the box for static service tax services things like QuickTime streaming web services DNS where the data behind the service doesn't change on a frequent basis because a very important in it and of itself does not replicate data and we'll talk about strategies for at in a minute so I just wanted to give you a graphical environment of what this looks like so we have two servers and what's important about this is that the secondary server doesn't have to be a server just sitting idle doing nothing that just is waiting for the primary server to fail both servers can be actively serving other other services and what we have here are machines that have a minimum of two Ethernet interfaces or IP over firewire each one has its own unique public interface and public IP address here the primary servers 1001 1 and the secondary server is 1001 dot 2 and then they have a private interface again this could be a thur net or IP over firewire that they use to communicate privately between them for heartbeat information in this case it's the 192 addresses one and dot two and so these machines are sending again a live messages between the two machines now let's give good in a situation where the primary server for any number of reasons dies whether it be the network link or hardware failure the machine men would stop sending heartbeat messages to the secondary server at that point the secondary server using the IP fail of our ability would kick off a series of scripts that would determine the specific actions that would happen in this case you know our primary server is a web server or secondary is a streaming server what we might choose to do here is fire up the web server on the secondary server and what it will do is it will add it will take over the IP address of the primary server becoming its presence on the network so in this case we're keeping both services alive both web services and streaming services and because the IP address is assigned to those continued to be alive the clients autumn and network would see no loss of services those because this is completely script driven though you have the ability to tune the exact behavior you might decide the web services of high transactional ability and decide that you really need to kill off the streaming server or maybe just nice it down to a much lower priority because these are all scripts that determine this behavior you have that ability to determine that exact behavior now as I mentioned IP failover does not replicate data okay so obviously the service needs to be able to fire up and run that service in the proper law configuration so you need to have datastage there and configuration file stage there for the situations when those get fired off and obviously you can use tools like rsync is just one example to replicate that data between the two services so this can be very powerful for the appropriate services obviously this architecture is not not ideal for things like file services that have heavy data requirements behind it you can imagine if it's my home directory server and I failover to a secondary server for my home directory isn't there it's not good to me that the server has is still available it's the data behind it that's important so this is really ideal for things like web services and streaming services as two examples again I want to stress that these are script driven so you have complete flexibility over the exact behaviors of what happens we actually provide sample scripts which you then can customize and tuned to your specific environment it also has the ability to send email notifications and things like that so that you know when you're in this kind of situation those handing go into as much as a much detail but we ought there also corresponding scripts to determine what happens when the primary server comes back up so we sail back and bring the original services up as expected i also want to stress that for availability IP failover isn't the only strategy many applications have their own architecture for IP failover or for high availability really and that's the best way to handle availability because you can determine that on application for specific basis some examples are stalkers communicate have a excellent to node clustered version that provides a high availability mail server and again having application level awareness is much better than a generic service and that's an excellent for solution for those environments I piece a lavar also isn't the only way to achieve availability using external load balancers for things like multiple web servers that can take a server out of the loop when a server fails is also another option and I also wanted to mention a new third party option from a fibre channel storage perspective you know one of the questions I get asked a lot as well if we could put our storage out on say an extra of raid an external storage device could we have that storage move over to the second server so that my home directories do follow me if I fail over to a secondary server obviously this requires the ability to map the storage from one machine to another and while we don't provide that functionality out of the box company called a stair has some new drivers for their fibre channel cards that have scriptable capabilities to do this so this is brand-new haven't tested it yet but it looks like a promising solution that could really complement a IP failover configuration i also just wanted to finish by talking about backup you know back up as a continual challenge given the huge quantities of data we're able to host given the turnover of data how much data turn turns on a regular basis and the realities at the time we have to back up is can shrinking the other reality is that raid while very critical from a server deployment perspective to provide data availability in and of itself is not a backup solution so when it first of all update on the latest options available for backing up on Mac OS 10 server so in a first and foremost dance retrospect product continues to have both client server solutions for Mac OS 10 so that that product continues to be available we have clients for a number of enterprise backup solutions arico legato pterodactyl tivoli veritas as some examples so why we can't be the backup engine we can be a client to an existing and enterprise backup solution in the reality is if you're deploying an xserve into an existing heterogeneous environments it's very likely already have one of these out there already and so can plug into those environments and finally one of the most recent addition to the backup space of for mac OS 10 is a third-party product from the tallest group called BR you this product is interesting from a number of perspectives first of all one of the first backup engines available on Mac OS 10 that can back up on multiple tape drives concurrently so it can drive multiple tape heads you know when you need to back up a large amount of data fast multiple pay pads is one of the the only way you can achieve that it can drive very large tape libraries it's driver agnostic so it's been able to plug in just about every tape backup device I've seen so far and then come back up over any available i/o channel whether it be you know entry-level USB or firewire devices scuzzy changers or rather uniquely backup over fibre channel so they're some of the higher-end backup solutions are actually connected over fibre channel this is particularly interesting because you can get the backup data movement off of your Ethernet network and use the bandwidth available on fibre channel that's a really excellent solution the other big trend that we're seeing is just to disk backup given the data turn on a regular basis and the quantities of data is really hard for tape to keep up and so we're seeing more and more customers deploy X or of an extra raid as backup solutions and there are a number of ways you can do this number of software techniques but basically for the low cost of storage available with xserve and extra raid you know use an extra raid as a backup target going just to disk and whether it be multiple servers backing up over networking / Gigabit Ethernet to a backup repository or going over fibre channel as a secondary even off-site one of the benefits of fiber channels we can go you know hundreds of meters even kilometers out over optical fibre channel for off-site replication on a second extra raid so this is a really growing trend in for large databases large data set this is a very viable way to do backup so just to finish up the last thing I wanted to highlight were somewhat I'll consider essential commands from a command-line perspective that can complement a extra of deployment scenario I get asked all the time you know I'm coming from another UNIX platform and you know if config doesn't always work the way I expected to on Mac OS 10 or how do I do this command on Mac OS 10 so I wanted to really highlight some of the commands that are unique to Mac OS 10 but give you very powerful capabilities first of all there's two very powerful system configuration tools the most important being network set up everything you can do in the network of preference pane in Mac OS 10 you can do through scripting or through command line in network setup you can turn on and off interfaces reorder them set them to dhcp set them to static IP addresses get what current values are set a very very powerful tool so rather than if config make sure you look up the man page for network setup and actually if you just type network setup at the command line it will spit back all of its options we have a similar tool called system setup that gives you access to a lot of the preference type information system name date and time network time server on and on and on system management tools one of the ones I find most valuable are the disk utility command disk utility is the command line equivalent of disk utility app lets you do things like create raid sets destroy rates that's rebuild raid set partition disk format discs very very handy for a configuration also great because you can script this very powerfully and so completely automate a specific setup requirement we have a number of tools for things like directory services vs import/export to be able to batch import users in and out create home directory well until you log in from the GUI your home directory isn't created and so you can force it to be created using this command line option obviously the SNMP configuration tool and this to base monitor is a background demon that will monitor disk utilization on the server and if you do a man on that that command you can see it has some very powerful capabilities for learning you about disk operations finally a software update command line software update to be able to from SSH update to the latest versions of software through software update this key finder is an interesting little utility it's a utility that will return the Bay number of the driving your xserve so if you ever want to configure from a past name into a bay one bay to bay three bay for this little utility will do that very handy for script and of course there's a command-line installer to be able to install packages of the command line and finally the ASR command we referenced earlier so just to wrap up this session we're running very close out of time here you know the reality is that you know with ITV being faced with continual challenges being able to deploy machines and services we really feel that with extra van eck mac OS x server and extra raid we can you know simplify server deployment provide faster services at lower costs with much easier system administration experience now there's been a lot of talk about Panther server over the course of this week I really just wanted to highlight a few quick features that are unique we think will be very handy for xserve deployments number of unique features one of the most important ones being the automatic setup feature we can take the setup experience and automate it even further than what we talked about today finally just to wrap up wanted to point you to some other sessions many of these were done earlier in the week so if you weren't able to attend them encourage you to watch the videos when they're available highlight the deploy next to raid session that's tomorrow afternoon talk more in depth about the storage side of our server products I also wanted to highlight some of the enterprise some of the developer and core OS applications that I think are important from a system administrator side again a lot of these actually all of these happened earlier this week but again video opportunities for replay and finally an invitation welcome feedback questions and comments and your my email address is here d brooks always welcome your feedback on xserve and your particular deployments and scenarios finally from a developer perspective skip Levin's is our server technology evangelist and his email is up there from from a developer side with specific development level questions and resources finally some some key references we have put a tremendous amount of effort into putting more resources available on the xserve and server web pages we have a lot of resources there and we'll continue to grow those over time have apple.com / servers kind of the one-stop shopping point for that location a very very valuable mailing list that Apple hosts on our listserv is the mac OS x server mailing list you