How tested Apple Xserve.
We ran an Xserve Quad Xeon configured above the base configuration (optional three Serial Attached SCSI, 697GB disk drives; twin Core-Duo Intel Xeon 5100 CPUs at optional 3GHz; optional 4GB of DDR2 memory; and optional 2GHz 2 Fibre Channel Interface card) in a Gigabit Ethernet switched network consisting of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server R2, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, Apple Xserve (MacOS 10.4.8) and numerous clients: Mac PowerBook G4 (MacOS 10.4.8), several HP notebook clients running Microsoft Vista Ultimate Edition or openSUSE 10 and several desktop PCs running Windows XP SP2.
We tested Xserver performance using a modification of LMBench3, our standard operating system and hardware benchmark. The modifications were required to permit use on the Mach kernel, the foundation of MacOS, because it doesn’t support real-time scheduling (see the LMBench3 source code for further details).
