2013 Apple Mac Pro as a virtualization platform?

Jokes.

Four memory slots is for the birds. Plus, the value of this is just not there. We are all aware how much extra Apple charges for gear..
 
4 memory slots but what is the max memory with 16G sticks being common now...

Sure the new design is sexy and all, but you literally now have 0 upgrade path for video cards if you wanted..and cpu... can you even take that thing apart to add anything to it, or did apple,likely, solder it shut...
 
For virtualizing OSX sure, since the only way to do it is use Apple hardware, have a mac mini sitting in its own cluster for just that purpose. But to actually use it to virtualize other OSes, it doesn't work. Theoretically you should be able to use 32GB dimms, for a max of 128GB of memory, but there are way to many drawbacks unless you're just going to have this sitting in your house for testing. It's not rackmountable, doesn't have 10GbE, expansion is all thunderbolt based, making everything even more expensive and any 1U single Xeon with comparable specs from a major vendor is going to cheaper, probably get dual Xeons for the same price.
 
Hard to say what the upgrade path is going to be since the final specs haven't been announced. The GPUs, if upgrades will be available, are sure to be expensive. Looks like standard RAM though.

An older Mac Pro might be a better choice - I have a GTX680 in mine, and while the the 3,1s will take 32GB, the newest ones will do 128GB of RAM.
 
As said above, the only purpose to do this is to virtualize oSX under the current EULA. Else it's not worth it.
 
mrweasel said:
Hard to say what the upgrade path is going to be since the final specs haven't been announced.
Click to expand...

it's not hard to say because we have pictures of it. there is nothing removable except memory.

on the off chance that the cpu is in a socket, and you want to disassemble the whole thing, you will be able to upgrade to... almost nothing. ivy-e has no path to haswell-e
 
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