Apple put the final nail in the Xserve’s coffin in January 2011 when it officially stopped selling rack-mounted servers. Instead, the company started pushing server customers toward Mac Pros and Minis. On Sept. 20 of this year, Apple lowered that coffin into the ground when macOS Sierra dropped software support for the systems. And while Xserves running El Capitan will keep getting security updates for a couple of years and the current build of the macOS Server software still runs on El Capitan, the hardware will soon be completely buried.

For a few years after the Xserve’s death, the company offered Mac Pro and Mac Mini Server configurations (PDF) that could do some of the same things, but even those options eventually disappeared. Even though Apple never offered true server-class hardware again, that doesn’t mean the hardware isn’t still out there doing its job. In our Sierra review we asked those of you who are still using Xserves to get in touch, and plenty of you did.

Why Xserve?

macOS Server started getting simpler not long after Apple discontinued the Xserve. For many of those simple tasks, a quad-core Mac Mini with two hard drives got the job done while keeping stored data safe-ish. But the Xserve’s hardware had a few unique things that Apple’s repurposed consumer desktops couldn’t replicate.

The most prominent of those features is probably Lights Out Management (LOM), a hardware feature that allowed administrators to remotely monitor temperature, fan speeds, and other sensor data. Servers are often kept in remote locations and not connected to monitors, so being able to keep an eye those numbers was valuable. But because LOM requires a separate coprocessor, it was never added to the Mac Mini or Mac Pro servers.

Because virtualization conserves power and simplifies server replacements, upgrades, and administration, it became a popular way to consolidate hardware around the turn of the decade. The Xserve’s number of processor cores and large banks of RAM made it a good fit for virtualization.

“We have five 2009 Xserves still in use, all running [VMWare] ESXi 6 as a cluster,” writes Elizabeth Harvey-Forsythe, a senior systems engineer at the MIT Media Lab. “Want a Mac VM? It’s relatively rare compared to Linux around here, but some of our students do, and for that you need Apple hardware, and we have little room for anything we can’t rackmount or that we can’t put fibre channel and 10Gbps Ethernet cards inside.”

Alex Clay, a software development manager at Suran Systems, uses an Xserve to virtualize Mavericks so that he can virtualize Mac OS 9. It’s a creative and convoluted solution that is nevertheless “a heck of a lot more reliable and stable than swapping out 10 plus-year-old hardware every time an HDD goes belly up.”

“Though it won’t run Windows, to my surprise, Xserves can actually run VMWare ESXi flawlessly,” wrote Nick Neely, another satisfied Xserve user. “From there I can run whatever operating system I want. Currently, multiple instances of Windows Server 2012. Blasphemy, I know.”

Firsthand reliability, secondhand prices

The Xserve’s reliability was mentioned by more than one person. Which makes sense, since server hardware has to be built to be more robust and stand up to more use than your standard consumer PC. Clay mentioned that his shop at Suran Systems had already moved its production servers to Mac Minis, but praised Xserves for being “beasts [that] ran with very little maintenance required.”

Neil Miller, an administrator at an ad agency with around two dozen Mac-centric users, told us that the “end is in sight” for his Xserve, but that “it’s not here yet.”

“Our Xserve still works, although not every single part of it—yeah proprietary drives/sleds, we’re talking about you!” he wrote to Ars. “The Xserve is a really, really well-built piece of kit, and I’ll be sorry to see it go.”

More than one person who bought Xserve hardware secondhand for cheap told us that finding secondhand parts to make fixes isn’t too difficult. Turns out that totally discontinuing a product and drastically simplifying the software that runs on it is a good way to make something drop in value.

“It’s pretty easy to find earlier Xserve models on eBay for next to nothing (under $100), because people seem to think that they’re stuck running Lion on the things,” wrote Neely. “I’m running an Xserve 2.1 [the early 2008 model] with dual quad-core Xeons, and I got a really good deal on it last year at $75.” Though some of those older Xserves were dropped long before El Capitan and Sierra, Neely says “install[ing] a basic graphics card and trick[ing] the installer into running all the way up to El Capitan” is relatively easy.

And a few of the Xserves still in operation are out there because the IT world is a slow-moving place, where migrating from one platform to another can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming.

“I still have four Xserve’s in production,” wrote network administrator Dave Walsh. “Two are just because they haven’t failed yet, so I haven’t moved DNS onto a newer Linux box. But two are still online because we still use Network Homes, and that requires an OpenDirectory server to maintain.”

“Network Homes” were Apple’s version of Windows’ “Roaming User Profiles,” and they’re used mostly to make hopping from one computer to another easier. Sign in to any of your business’s Macs with your network account and the Mac knows to look on the server for your user profile and files instead of the local drive. Walsh says that his school has been pushing students and staff away from Network Homes over the last few years, but the process isn’t finished yet.

“Once I can put the last nail in the coffin of Network Homes,” Walsh told us, “then I can move full steam into Linux and a VM environment. But until then I’m stuck maintaining legacy gear.”