Migrating to Mac OS X Server

Just before Christmas I bought myself a Mac Mini Server with OS X Lion Server. The idea behind this machine is to replace my current server (a almost 7 year old Dell PowerEdge 2850). From the specs this machine is way faster, has more diskspace (although no RAID5, but I have a NAS for storage anyway) and it uses way less energy than the current setup. Based on a quick calculation, the mac mini server would use less than 15% compared to the Dell, which means that this investment would earn itself back in about 2 – 3 years.

I have been playing around with the Mac OS X Lion Server for a while to make up my mind how I want to migrate my current setup. Since Mac OS X is based on BSD, it does provide a very good platform to replace my linux-based setup, but I am not quite convinced yet the way Apple has structured would work for me. Besides, I do like to keep some things separate, so I am still looking for a good way to do this. So far the only (and most efficient / easiest) way to achieve these appears to be running some services in a VM.

In the coming weeks I will be migrating different services from my Linux-based setup to either something running on Mac OS  X Lion Server natively, or inside a VM running on Linux on the Mac Mini Server. Each of these migrations will be described here to help others.