+1 I like this suggestion a lot. I ran into a similar issue at a client and I used VM to split the difference. SBS 2003 Server was on 5yr old Dell and no extended warranty available. Bought new server for about $5K (2008 Server OS) and VM'd their SBS 2003 with Hyper-V. If you count time this was a reasonable way to move SBS2K3 to new hardware and the physical machine has enough capacity to run a second VM, which would allow us to (swing) migrate to 2008 SBS Server on the same physical machine.
Dave From: Erik Goldoff [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 9:44 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: OT ? Server ROI - Reuse ? Does this server meet the hardware requirements for Windows Server 2008r2 ? If you're going to keep it at least three more years, you want to be running an OS that's still properly supported for your mission critical application. Also, if the existing hard drives have been spinning constantly for the last three years, I would consider those drives the weak link in the chain, and most likely component to fail first. If you cannot afford this server to be down even if drives can be replaced under warranty ( some wait time cannot be avoided ) then I'd add the cost of brand new fresh drives to the warranty extension and then balance that against the cost of a new server. Just my two cents On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Jeremy Anderson <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I am not even sure what the subject of this should be. I have a server, it's about 3 years old, the warranty expires in 15 days. It runs a %mission critical App%. This App is going to be replaced with %new mission critical app%. This server meets the hardware requirements for %new app% just fine. (it does require a BIOS update) Its been a stable and reliable server for the last 3 years. I can purchase an extended warranty for around $500, or I can purchase a new server for around $4500.00. The bean counters say, buy the warranty, run %new app% on it, life is good and we save 4 grand. My instinct is that this is a horrible idea, and we should just buy a new server. If we run %new app% on %old server% we will be completely wiping and reloading the OS. My question for everyone here is: How do I convince the bean counters that this is a bad idea. Or, is it not a bad idea, and is a 3 year old server not really that old? How do I justify spending 4k on a server when technically we have a perfectly good server sitting there to be reused? Am I just getting distracted by bright shiny things? %NewApp% is mission critical. If %NewApp% is down, the company is dead in the water. To put this in prospective however, %NewApp% will not be redundant, or even highly available and we are not even considering those options. Think of %newApp% like an Exchange server, for a company that relies on Email for all their communication. And yes, I know %newapp% should be clustered or highly available, but its not going to happen. Does this email make sense? Any help, or insight on the matter would be appreciated. Thanks Jeremy ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
