I was also able to find my way to viewing the amounts of various resources, such as memory, disk and processor usage on my Windows server. Interpreting them was another matter, and the graphs were hard to read and comprehend. While it gave me the information I needed to monitor the server's performance, such as application usage, environmental factors and temperature, it took a little deciphering and was not as visually intuitive as I hoped it might be.
On the other hand, Apple's server management screens were easy to find, visually intuitive and informative. There was no guessing or interpreting what was being seen. Green light, good. Red light, bad. It was all simple and self-explanatory. This was a welcome feature. I could get the performance information needed with a quick glance at the screen instead of having to sit and decipher it like the Windows Server.
Setting up automatic update features was painless on both systems and accomplished with just a few mouse clicks.
It was, however, slow going at first seeing the Windows server, just as it had been for Windows seeing the Apple server, but once the right strings were input, there was nothing to it. And changing the folder shared by the Web server was a piece of cake.
In terms of security, the Windows Server 2003 might be your better bet because of more restrictions on its password rules. However, since I couldn't even get through the password policies, it may have been a little too secure for my blood. Besides, just because the Xserve doesn't require the mix of letters and numbers doesn't mean you can't make it an internal policy. Setting up a new user on the Apple was definitely a faster process. Both machines seem to be on equal ground when it comes to starting and stopping Web services and with the proper information seeing the other server. Each server also had a satisfactory "server management" area.
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