I'm involved with a project that just got its Xserve this week, and spent some of today setting it up. It's a very nice piece of hardware, and the G5 runs rings around my 1.2 GHz G4. I'm a little upset that there doesn't seem to be a sound-out port, what with the MacQuake 4 demo being released today (just kidding, of course -- I guess), but with a PCI RAID card, three 500 gig hotswap drives, video-out, and 2 gigs of RAM, it's well configured.

Here are two things I've learned:

1.) Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) runs VNC by default. Open up Sharing from System Preferences, click on ARD, and hit Confugure (or whatever it is, exactly). Make sure you enable VNC with a password. Voila. Very nice. I'd rather have OSXvnc working with ssh tunneling. Still having some trouble getting that working for some strange reason.

2.) If you've got the PCI RAID card in your Xserve and want to know how to configure it, you need to grab "Xserve G5 PCI Hardware RAID Card Specifications." The file name is Xserve_G5_PCI_HW_RAID_Users_Guide.pdf, and it's on Apple's site.

It's a good pdf showing how to use the megaraid command. For me, it's very simple to set up the three drive bays in RAID 5. The command is simply...
megaraid -create auto

Very nice.

You also use megaraid to set up alarms and other options. It's all in the pdf. Um, and our Xserve came with the drive bays attached to the SATA connectors on the RAID card, but without setting it up as a RAID. Once I saw the three drives listed my first boot up, I was off to booting from the DVD and using "Utilities -- Terminal" from within the Installer to run megaraid, then Disk Utilitiy to format before reinstalling the OS and starting from scratch. A pain, and lazy on Apple's part, but it really is, so far, a great machine. MySQL and php tomorrow and then we'll be ready to roll.