Over the last few months I’ve been migrating a few old machines to a new(er) Dell T105 running VMWare ESXi. I upgraded the standard configuration to 4GB memory, a 1.5TB sata drive, and an additional Broadcom pci-x gigabit card. I’ve got a quad core processor, AMD Opteron 2.3 GHz Budapest 1356, coming from NewEgg soon and I’m hoping to upgrade the ram to the max 8GB shortly. This is quite a step up from one of the machines I’ve been hosting my sites and email from – my wife’s old AMD K6 350 MHz from when she started college. It has been a trooper over the last 11 years. All I’ve had to do is replace the fan once while it was sitting and humming away at my old work. My original plan was to try and get the machine running directly in a vm by just copying over the filesystems and making sure the kernel would support the new hardware. That was easier said than done, so I ended up simply migrating the services over slowly.
In July I migrated all the email hosted on it to gmail directly and it is so much easier to deal with. Yesterday (Saturday August 8th) I moved all the websites to it and got all of the DNS switched over. All that is left is to switch it off! I’m already thinking about what I can do to turn off my next oldest computer, a Dell PowerEdge 1400SC “server” with a 18GB 10K rpm U160 SCSI drive and a couple ide drives.