Andrew Cunningham at AnandTech:
Lion Server’s main problem, from an IT person’s point of view, has less to do with the software’s functionality and more to do with Apple’s software support model. Lion Server is a good product that maintains most of the appeal of past OS X Server versions, but like the client version of Lion, it’s clearly a transitional product that makes many changes and foreshadows many more, and there’s less tolerance for that sort of thing in the server room than on the client end. If your organization depended on something like the Print or QuickTime Streaming service in Snow Leopard Server, or the ability to join Windows clients to Open Directory, Apple decided that those services were obsolete and got rid of them; now you’re stuck having to find something else to do the same work.
With the Server Admin Tools so clearly on their way out and Server.app not quite ready to pick up all the slack, the direction that OS X Server is headed isn’t very clear. It’s a good product today, but what will it be in two years? In five? This is the sort of thing that server admins, especially Windows server admins used to Microsoft’s longer guaranteed support cycles, worry about, and with Lion Server Apple isn’t doing much to allay those fears.
This 11,000 word review is well worth the time it takes to read if you depend on OS X Server. Like the client version of OS X, this really feels like a beginning and an end.
As Apple shifts more toward the consumer end of the spectrum, those of us with Xserves are feeling more and more like dinosaurs with each release. To say that I’m nervous about the future of OS X Server would be a massive understatement.