•Home directories for network users can be consolidated onto one server or distributed among various servers. While you can move home directories if you need to, you may need to change a large number of user and share point records, so devise a strategy that will persist for a reasonable amount of time. See the user management guide for information about home directories.
•Some services offer ways to control the amount of disk space used by individual users. For example, you can set up both home directory and mail quotas for users. Consider whether using quotas will offer a way to maximize the disk usage on a server that stores home directories and mail databases. The user management guide and mail service administration guide describe home directory and mail quotas, respectively.
•Disk space requirements are also affected by the type of files a server hosts. Creative environments need
•If you will be setting up a streaming media server, you’ll need to allocate enough disk space to accommodate a certain number of hours of streamed video or audio. See the QuickTime Streaming Server administration guide for hardware and software requirements and for a setup example.
•The number of NetBoot client computers you can connect to a server depends on the server’s Ethernet connections, the number of users, and other factors, and DHCP services need to be available. See the system image administration guide for NetBoot capacity planning guidelines.
•Mac OS X Server offers extensive support for Windows users. You can consolidate Windows user support on servers that provide PDC services, or you can distribute services for Windows users among different servers. The Windows services administration guide describes the options available to you.
•If you want to use software RAID to stripe or mirror disks, you’ll need two or more drives (they can’t be FireWire drives) on a server. See online help for Disk Utility for more information.
Before finalizing decisions about which servers will host particular services, familiarize yourself with information in the individual administration guides for services you want to deploy.
Define a Migration Strategy
When you are using computers with Mac OS X Server versions earlier than 10.3, consider updating them to version 10.3.
When you are using Mac OS X Server version 10.1 or 10.2, you can often simply upgrade your server during the installation process. This approach is simple, because it automatically preserves the data and settings you’ve been using.
Chapter 5 Before You Begin
75
