Product ReviewsApple (MC190Z/A) for Mac

Snow Leopard Server OEM dropin disk for Xserve

This particular auction was for a set of OS install disks that originally came with an Xserve machine from 2009. The seller did confirm with me to make sure I knew what i was bidding on. But unfortunately the Xserve machine i have is *not* from the machine model set it was bundled with. So i had to bend over backwards and edit the installer configuration script to get it to install. However, once it was installed it was easy to set up and configure.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server is probably the best *server* version of Mac OS X made. It covers the transition from PowerPC chips to the Intel chips so it is able to use Rosetta to run older PowerPC software on the Intel architecture. Snow Leopard was the last OS to support this. Snow Leopard Server is also the last full ‘Server’ version of the Mac OS in that it provided a wide set of server services and support for their configuration and administration. Later versions of Mac OS Server removed functionality until Apple stopped offering a Server option for the OS in April 2022.
I have a fairly large amount of legacy software that spans the PowerPC to Intel transition, some of which will never be transitioned to the Intel let alone the modern Apple M1, M2 and future chips.
Snow Leopard Server allows me to push network boot images and centrally manage shared user data, an internal knowledge base website, internal email service among other critical server based services.
Previously i had been using an ad hock set of tools to manage the critical services. As parts for some of the hardware has become difficult to find I have decided to transition to a virtual machine system which unfortunately requires an OS that Apple has blessed to be used for VMs so i had to convert my existing Snow Leopard setup to a Snow Leopard Server setup.
Functionally my users have not noticed the transition and as far as they are aware the announced transition will occur in three weeks.

All this said, I’m not sure why eBay has chosen me to review a 13 year old OS which has limited use to anyone outside the legacy computer/software community. Read full review...

Verified purchase:  Yes | Condition: pre-owned | Sold by: cybersurplus9000