Server Clone

[Scream]

A small local business has asked me to look after their IT end of things. They have an old server running Server 2003 and they use it to run terminal service connections for up to 12-machines which don't all run at the one time. The software they use is for basic sales/invoicing which the software is hosted on the server and each client machine remote connects to it and runs the software from it.

The server has no backup methods apart from a database backup every week or so. The server needs cleaned out as there appears to be viruses and all sorts on it and its started to get slow and crashes now and again.

I was thinking about sticking a temporary server in the office while I take this one away and clean it out or even convince them to get a new one.

Is there anyway I can easily clone their server over to another one and take theirs away while the temporary one continues in its place?

The software they use is client licenced and they pay a yearly support fee but its like talking to the wall if I was to ask the software owners to move the software to another server and they always quote £100's to do anything out of the support criteria.

I haven't worked much with servers and I only started this past few months to play with Server 2008 on a server I have set up so my knowledge isn't that great yet.

Is it possible to do such a thing? Could it even be cloned to a VM?

Cheers

 

[Scream]

The networking end is a piece of cake, terminal services, DHCP and whatever. They don't use it as a print server as they print directly to the printer via the network.

My point was refering to replicating the server as I can't put the software that they use onto another system as they have to do it. It's just a piece of crap software which I could have wrote better 15 years ago.

If the job was simple to fix then I would have it fixed.

paradigm - cheers for that. I worked with VMware back in 2002/03 but didn't carry it on due to career change but I will check it out.