Why not? It's easy to administer, has administrative capabilities similar to Linux and it's pretty stable. I'd rather have production Mac servers than Windows servers personally.
It also has no real support, even at the enterprise level[1]. At MacWorld 2009, the entire Mac IT speakers track agreed that their best move had been switching all of their servers to Linux, hands-down, simply because Apple isn't interested in being a serious player in the server space. If you're a small design shop, yeah, an XServe is probably going to be fine but if your needs are any more serious this is a lot of risk to take for generally more expensive servers.
[1] Simple example: 10.5.2 broke NFS permissions so non-owners could not write to files. The phone support could do nothing about this and we had two choices: wait months for the next fix, patch darwin ourselves and run with a custom kernel (i.e. completely unsupported), or use a different server. The situation's not much better on the hardware side.
No package management, some services simply breaking between upgrades, the lack of a package management can turn it to be horrible to deal with needed third party software when security flaws arise if you have more than one server running.
Comments
Why not? It's easy to administer, has administrative capabilities similar to Linux and it's pretty stable. I'd rather have production Mac servers than Windows servers personally.
It also has no real support, even at the enterprise level[1]. At MacWorld 2009, the entire Mac IT speakers track agreed that their best move had been switching all of their servers to Linux, hands-down, simply because Apple isn't interested in being a serious player in the server space. If you're a small design shop, yeah, an XServe is probably going to be fine but if your needs are any more serious this is a lot of risk to take for generally more expensive servers.
[1] Simple example: 10.5.2 broke NFS permissions so non-owners could not write to files. The phone support could do nothing about this and we had two choices: wait months for the next fix, patch darwin ourselves and run with a custom kernel (i.e. completely unsupported), or use a different server. The situation's not much better on the hardware side.
No package management, some services simply breaking between upgrades, the lack of a package management can turn it to be horrible to deal with needed third party software when security flaws arise if you have more than one server running.