Dealing with a legacy unix box.

Vince

Vince

Vince

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Hi All,

I work with a company where we are now fully virtualised onto a hp6300 eva along with an older storage works eva. As it stands all of our systems are in VMware ESXI 5 and running well, this is all but one server.

The server in question is a legacy unix box, the box was installed in 1990 and is still alive, just, however today one of the power supplies failed which took the box down. I have managed to revive it but am now looking at possible ways to get it off of the hardware and into either a unix VM on the eva or alternatively I would just like to export the database off of the machine into SQL.

The question I guess is what are my options... I could just let the thing die which is what the company is prepared to do but having some kind of fresh backup of the system/database that can be bought up in an emergency is the preferred option.

Is there some kind of simple wm converter? The system is almost as old as me so anything crazy technical and I may need some hand holding as my exposure to unix is not massive.

Any thoughts wold be appreciated.

Cheers.
 
I'm quite sure VMWare converter will allow you to target a physical machine and convert it to a VM for you. After that you can power it on (sans networking) to check and then turn off your old physical and keep on the VM with networking.

I've done this with countless windows boxes and know of Linux working, I do not see why you couldn't do it with a Unix VM?
 
I was thinking the same, just hoping that there is somebody out there who has done this already.

I guess I will hold out a bit longer and see if anybody has dedicated any time to this. I can't see it being all that difficult and converter seems to support it but I just don't know how good a job it will do.
 
What hardware? It has to be x86 compatible hardware to be able to be virtualised. And what UNIX? It has to be supported under VMware. In terms of P2V, you are going to struggle to find a tool that supports an OS from 1990 (22 years old).
 
When she boots she tells me that she is 386 compatible hardware. You guys appear to have confirmed my suspicions that it just isn't worth the pain that migrating it is likely to cause.

Time to get the business used to the idea of life without an old school system.
 
You should be identifying (a) exactly what the OS is and (b) what the impact to the business is of not having this service available?

It's all well and good having a fresh backup which can be brought up in an emergency but you need to have something to bring it back on that is compatible with the OS. Will the database on the system even export the data in a format which can easily import into a modern database instance?
 
OS is Unix Ware 2.1 - I have had a chat with the partners here today and we are just going to let this run until it dies a death. The accounts system was replaced 6 years ago and although there are paper based records the old unix based system is still used to reference certain things.

To be honest there doesn't seem to be any appetite (now its running again) to do anything with it. I guess ill support it the best I can while its alive and get the accounts department used to using paper files for retrieving from the archive. I'm still investigating a way of exporting data into something like sql/reporting services but that's going to take a while.
 
Appears to be easy enough to virtualise under VMWare:
http://fixunix.com/sco/90597-sco-unixware-2-1-x-vmware-server-1-0-3-a.html

This is how I'd probably do it (As a Unix savvy amateur):
Drop the HDD into a modern box (It'll almost certainly be a ~500mb IDE drive, so should be recognised by anything with an IDE port), and pull off an image of it. Again, store an unmodified copy of this image somewhere extremely safe :)

Looks to me like you should be able to then use the boot floppy linked in the thread above to insert the appropriate IDE controller drivers into the system and you'll be good to go.
Either way, hiring a decent tech with Unix experience ought to be able to virtualise this pretty easily. I wouldn't try going down the road of trying to import into something else personally, it'll end up being a shedload of trouble.

-Leezer-
 
...pop the hood and drop us a photo! Only one way to tell for sure!

Again, any hints as to the database software would be nice, no idea what database software was like back then; wonder whether it'd be comparable to anything modern & therefore whether you might be able to move the data easily to (say) *nix and PostgreSQL or MySQL
 
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