Joel Rennich at AFP548 (a MacOSX Server oriented site) has published a detailed description of the process he went through when installing a new XServe at his colocation facility.
He's apparently got a much more complicated setup, since there are several steps that we didn't have/want to do, and his time estimates for others are longer than I'd have guessed. Regardless, it's good to see another report of just how easy it is to fully configure and deploy these bad boys.
Also of note are his recommendations for backup strategies. I currently use rsync to backup important stuff to another drive on our commons webserver - but the data has gotten so big there isn't a safe place for it off that machine. This will get better once we have the XRAID hooked up, but still...