Hi All,

Will it be possible to run FileMaker Server 11 on a MacMini Core 2 Duo with 4 GB ram, running Snow Leopard 10.6?

I am expecting to have 6 - 10 users connected for this solution.

Cheers,

JPierre

Don't see why not. You might want to change the hard drive to a 7200 rpm and suitably rated for 24/7 operation. In fact that is my next move too and I have 30+ users.

Can I order one with 7200 RPM drives, or should I take it to a shop to have it done. - Sorry for this dump question.

Apple don't supply the faster drives - so it's 3rd party services. Make sure you find someone who knows what they are doing as there's a few tricks to get inside the Mac Mini - easily found on the web though.

Edited March 12, 201015 yr by Guest

I certainly would not recommend or use such a consumer grade machine for hosting databases.

Steven

The Mini makes a great small-workgroup FileMaker server, as I recently posted here:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showpost.php?post/352217/

Just get a faster hard drive like people are saying (external is an option, too). The new Mini's are quite fast (FM Server isn't much of a CPU hog anyway) and even the dual-internal drive server edition has been shown to generate surprisingly little heat inside that compact enclosure.

Maybe "consumer grade" but the choice is then Mac Pro or Xserve - mega bucks for 6-10 user operation.

Bet it would really fly with a Solid State Drive!!

Thanks all for your reply and assistance.

As much as I respect Steven's response, these solutions will be quite an investment for this solution. Therefore, I am kind of sold to Ideal Data's and Marc's suggestions, with an external 7200 Raid drive. Thank you all for all your help.

Cheers

/JP

Maybe "consumer grade" but the choice is then Mac Pro or Xserve - mega bucks for 6-10 user operation.

Not really. A mega bucks server would be in the $30K and higher range, and an xServe clearly is not.

How much is it worth to have a high quality server if you have to pay to have the drives restored on one that the chief server engineer called a 40% utilization tested one?

Steven

I am curious to know if this solution worked well?

Will FM server 11 be able to backup to a firewire hard drive?

Would it be better(faster) to boot and run from an external "enterprise" hard drive in a firewire 800 enclosure? and then just use the internal notebook drive for backups?

What would you say would be the limit for a Mini served FM DB? how many users? or how many records?

Edited May 18, 201015 yr by Guest

Never going to happen. Get the Mini.

I did get a mini - and I pursued the solid state drive and 4Gb RAM to initiate 64-bit mode. The boot time is incredible - 8 seconds from cold to desktop! It also opens my 40+ file solution in less than 60 seconds whereas my old G5 Xserve took around 5 minutes.

We will be curious to see how that works out in the long term. Seems like you have to be a smart shopper to get SSD to keep its performance up.

We are running FMS11 on the new mac mini server and it works great. Needed a little tweaking to connect to the Windows Active Directory, but mostly works well.

Since it's my first experience with Mac OS X, I needed to learn Perl scripting.

Since it's a "consumer grade", backups, backups and backups.

How about using a MacMini with a RAM disk? Suppose you have database of 500 Mbyte, a RAMdisk of ca 3 Gbyte and you have FileMaker Server running with the files on the RAMdisk. Naturally, you must backup the whole thing several times a day, because if the Mini goes down, so does the 'disk'. Or does FileMaker store the tempfiles in its own directory?

HE

I went the Mac mini way with an SSD drive and couldn’t be happier. Hundreds of millions of records and fast as can be. 120 users.

Did you get the SSD supplied by Apple or did you purchase it separately?

And would you recommend getting extra RAM or a faster CPU (the corei7)?

We have a Mini (Server edition) here also, two internal disks, RAID configured, works great. The only issue is RAM. There's only two slots and the largest modules (to date) are 4 GB/each. Still, for a small workgroup I can definitely recommend it. It's very energy efficient too.

FYI, the i5/i7 models support up to 16GB with 8GB DIMMs:

http://eshop.macsale.../shop/mac-mini/

- John

FYI, the i5/i7 models support up to 16GB with 8GB DIMMs

Wasn't aware of that - thank you for your correction. Will go order some RAM myself just now... :-)