Before someone jumps to a "OMG computers have to be kept off!" purge,
let's allow some math to give us some perspective.
400 watt is your max use of typical low end PC.
Off course, they don't pull that all time when powered on unless doing a
crazy indefinite load.
(folks with crazy indefinite loads should host elsewhere BTW...)
And I really want to encourage folks who have a dedicated PC or other
server equipment with a small personal load to move to the vm server:
http://www.skullspace.ca/wiki/index.php/Vmsrv
The math may say that a 400 watt device is only 77c a day (and our
electricity problems are probably much bigger vis a vis air conditioning
and the thermal properties of the building) but consolidating is still
the "right" thing to do to just avoid unnecessary resource use in
general, there are also things like space, wire tangle, and noise to
having extra hardware lying around.
I'm am still offering free migration assistance to anyone who wants to
retire their personal server and move. Just get in touch by email and
we'll make a date.
I do this kind of thing for a living and am obsessed with finding the
best ways to minimize downtime for these situations. I've pulled off
impressive migrations before.
And Vmsrv has been up for the last 62 days, not bad for the chaotic
summer we've been having!
I know that people often have put a lot of work getting their own
servers online.
As for the time you've spent cleaning up and upgrading old hardware,
well that's certainly gone. Be thankful for the opportunity to move to
something faster!
Even more time intensive was probably your effort to get all your
software, configurations, and code going right?
You don't need to start again on that with a fresh OS install,
re-install of applications, copying of configs and code etc..
If you're running a 32 bit x86 OS that is portable across hardware, none
of that is neccesary, I can set-up a VM instance with the exact same
partitioning scheme and MBR and make perfect, file-system level copies
that boot up just fine. (I'm not talking about a mount and cp/tar
approach either, I use real file system level copying tools that
actually understand the file system type [ntfs, ext4, btfs] being copied)
(we need a new CPU to do 64bit guests..)
I'm particularly adept at this if you're running a GNU/Linux system
Linux Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, or CentOS.
I was even surprised recently to see a Windows XP pro image from a PC
boot up on a VM with totally different hardware, all it demanding was
phone-home reactivation.
Also, a migration to the VM server need not be a grand leap of faith --
I can get a copy of your server up and running and leave the original in
production so that you can test, test, test the copy for awhile if you want.
Mark
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