Leopard Server running on a shiny Xserve is beyond the means of many small businesses, creative shops, and IT departments large and small. There's a lot of power and potential wrapped up in an Xserve, and starting today, Media Temple and Parallels are letting customers get a slice of Leopard Server with the world's first Virtual Private Server (VPS) product.
Armed with Xserves, server virtualization technology from Parallels, and a thumbs up from Apple, Media Temple is the first hosting company to offer OS X Leopard Server VPS packages. Opening as a private beta program to which you can apply, Media Temple's Xserve-Virtual beta offers Leopard running in a virtual server with all the features and administrative power that small to medium-sized businesses could want while adding simple scalability, a premium data center, and the fast bandwidth that comes with it.
Features include a collaborative iCal server, hosted, secure iChat server, Leopard-powered wiki, blog, and web hosting, podcast production and publishing tools, and remote management using Apple's tools, all of them running on an Xserve's 64-bit architecture. Time Machine will be available for making backups to your local Xserve-Virtual account, and Media Temple will eventually bring a "snapshot" feature online for backing up the entire account.
Ars Technica is getting an exclusive hands-on with one of these Xserve-Virtual accounts, and we'll have a full writeup for you soon.
Obviously, Apple is looking to get Xserves and OS X Server in front of more users, and a partnership like this with a respected hosting company and Parallels is a smart way to do it. The type of customer Media Temple has designed these accounts for typically has an Xserve on their to-do list right next to the champagne-powered jacuzzi and the employee retreat cabin in Aspen. Apple's hoping that, once small businesses and curious IT departments can take Leopard Server and (a slice of) an Xserve for a spin, they'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends... you get the picture.
As far as what's powering this partnership Parallels and Media Temple have with Apple, the Xserves are packed with 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors, 32GB 800MHz DDR2 ram, 3x300GB 15,000-rpm SAS drives with 16MB disk cache on a Xserve RAID Card. When Media Temple brings its (xv) program out of beta, each customer will get a single core of the Xserve and 2GB of RAM dedicated to their account. During this private beta period, however, each account gets two dedicated processing cores and 2GB of RAM.
Each Xserve-Virtual account runs in its own isolated, virtualized environment, and Media Temple will allow customers to install anything that can run on OS X. Remember kids, OS X Leopard Server ships with Apache 2, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat 5, WebObjects 5.4, and a 64-bit Java VM, and it supports plenty of other tools. Media Temple's Xserve-Virtual customers will also have Leopard Server's ability to host multiple websites at their disposal.
A price for these accounts is yet to be determined. Through our correspondence, Media Temple made it clear to me that this is uncharted territory for both itself and Parallels, so customer feedback during the private beta program will be key in determining final package pricing. This means that if you're one of the lucky few to get in during the beta, you'll get to bang on your own virtualized Leopard Server environment free of charge for a limited time.
You can find more details about this intriguing new program at Media Temple's Xserve-Virtual product page, and we'll have that hands-on ready for you soon.
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