Upgrade Xserve from Loepard to Lion

[luketheduke]

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone has any advice or tricks to pull this one off...

We have a late 2008 Xserve which will support Lion (not ML) and it is currently running Leopard. We want to upgrade it to Lion, but it's unfortunate timing with Mountain Lion's release yesterday.

I guess I have these questions:

1. Is there any way of downloading Snow Leopard from Apple (or any where else that's reputable)?
2. Is it possible to download a USB flash drive install media for Lion?
3. How would one go about purchasing the Lion Server app now?

I'm guessing most or all of those are difficult or impossible. I've spoken to Apple about it and they've just said it's not possible to purchase anything other than ML now.

Ideally we don't want to spend too much on this upgrade, it's only to try and bring it a bit more up to speed. It's also not ideal to upgrade to a Mac Mini server, this is in an enterprise and proper rack mounting is best, obviously.

More over, this upgrade has to be legal too, we don't want to tread on Apple's licence.


Thanks for any help!

 

[Alameda]

Snow Leopard was sold on DVD, and surely you can find a new or used DVD. Heck, I'll sell you mine once I finish upgrading the other machines to ML.

 

[luketheduke]

Snow Leopard was sold on DVD, and surely you can find a new or used DVD. Heck, I'll sell you mine once I finish upgrading the other machines to ML.

Thanks, I did know that SL was sold on disc. The main concerns are Lion install and Lion Server app.

Obviously it's useless to upgrade to Lion just to be stuck without the Server app...

 

[foidulus]

Thanks, I did know that SL was sold on disc. The main concerns are Lion install and Lion Server app.

Obviously it's useless to upgrade to Lion just to be stuck without the Server app...

The issue is that SL server was pretty pricy, Lion Server was $60 a server($30 for the OS, $30 for the server), but SL was $500, a pretty steep increase....

 

[mdenwood]

The issue is that SL server was pretty pricy, Lion Server was $60 a server($30 for the OS, $30 for the server), but SL was $500, a pretty steep increase....

When I upgraded from SL server to Lion server I had a problem with the App store behind our proxy server, so I downloaded both on a separate machine (without installing) and put them in the Applications folder of the target server before upgrading - and that worked OK. So if you can get hold of the install apps for both it should work in the absence of the app store on Leopard (although worst case scenario you may have to clean install Lion and then run the Server upgrade app if Lion won't upgrade over Leopard).

The difficult part that I realised I haven't helped you with is obtaining the two installers. Do you know anybody that might have kept them after a Lion + server install last year that you might be able to borrow from? I've just checked and Lion Server isn't available in my (standard Lion install) App store so you do need both I'm afraid.