Buy Xserve for first time

Hi there,

i need a xserver for my small business 10 people for staying in good comunication and well organized between all for business managment. Some work from another city.

My questions:
I was thinking to buy a the quad core xserve with 6 GB memory, don´t know if should ad a solid state drive and a raid card, bay 1 one TB, bay 2 - 160GB serial and in bay 3 as well, dont know about the expansion slots neither the extra power supply nor the SAS drive kid, I think the Apple Remote Desktop 3.3 could be usefull, do i have to buy more licenses of example MSoffice for each computer or can i install through the xserver one single license to all computers? How good is the quality of the xserver so that i dont have to buy the apple service parts kid?

I would appreciate your comments very much and send you kind wishes from Mexico

Christian

I don't honestly know of all of the options on an XServe, if it were me buying a single server at work to be the primary server for work I'd probably want:

raid (at least mirroring so if one drive fails, the system doesn't go down)
extra PS (it's nice having a backup powersupply in the chassis itself so if one fails, you don't have to have the system down until you can get another)
I personally prefer SAS over sata for servers, but if you can't afford the SAS drives, at least get the SAS controller as you can (well, at least from other manufacturers, I don't know if Apple does something hinky here or not with a controller bios to prevent using sata drives on a sas controller) use Sata drives on a SAS controller, but not the other way around.

In terms of licensing for Microsoft products, you will need a license for each product for each end workstation. So if you have MSOffice, and you want it on 10 systems, you'll need a license for each system (the only caveat to that, is that most licenses allow for a person to install their copy on a couple computers, ie: desktop and laptop, as long as only one is used at any given time - but that caveat doesn't apply to offices where you install it on multiple systems for multiple people to be using simultaneously). Many companies that need to install a MS product on many systems tend to look into volume licensing (this is what we use at my work, but we install MS products on between 10 (windows servers) and 250 (desktops) systems depending on the product) - but I think your still too small for that, but it can't hurt to look into it, at least to see if they have some sort of workgroup licensing that would allow install and use on up to X systems. MS licensing is completely independent of Apple licensing.

Quality I can't comment on, I don't own an xserve.