Cloning an old server into a VM. Necessary for specific software to run
Posted: 28. Feb 2021, 20:43
I am relatively out of the loop with newer VM software. I used to mess around with VMs quite often several years ago, but I'm a bit out of practice, so consider me new. Here's the situation:
I have a friend who owns a bowling alley, and has contacted me to help him with his computerized scoring system. He obtained it legally from another bowling center that was shutting down, and got all of the infrastructure as well as the server that ties everything together. The older server is a Windows 2000 Server box, running on a Pentium 4, with SCSI hard drives and the scoring server software already installed (obviously). The problem is that this old server is showing signs of impending death, and we need to get this system back up as soon as possible (It crashed pretty hard when it was taken live with several lanes operational). Would it be possible to clone the drives over to a VM and have everything run from there? I know that emulating W2K server is possible, and I know that emulating SCSI interfaces is possible, but I'm not sure what the best way to approach this issue is. While we do legitimately have the program on the source drives, we do not have a way to re-install the program if those drives fail. I have successfully created clone images of the drives (on drive with two partitions). I have a new host system with a 10-series Core i5 and 16GB of RAM, which should have no problems hosting this VM, I'm just at a loss as to where to start with this project. Any advice? Just pointing me in a direction would be enough.
I have a friend who owns a bowling alley, and has contacted me to help him with his computerized scoring system. He obtained it legally from another bowling center that was shutting down, and got all of the infrastructure as well as the server that ties everything together. The older server is a Windows 2000 Server box, running on a Pentium 4, with SCSI hard drives and the scoring server software already installed (obviously). The problem is that this old server is showing signs of impending death, and we need to get this system back up as soon as possible (It crashed pretty hard when it was taken live with several lanes operational). Would it be possible to clone the drives over to a VM and have everything run from there? I know that emulating W2K server is possible, and I know that emulating SCSI interfaces is possible, but I'm not sure what the best way to approach this issue is. While we do legitimately have the program on the source drives, we do not have a way to re-install the program if those drives fail. I have successfully created clone images of the drives (on drive with two partitions). I have a new host system with a 10-series Core i5 and 16GB of RAM, which should have no problems hosting this VM, I'm just at a loss as to where to start with this project. Any advice? Just pointing me in a direction would be enough.