VM and LTO

It's a PE 2900 III that’s running SBS2003 that backs up to an internal LTO-3 drive (U320) using the SBS tweaked version of Windows backup.

With some additional ram, and possibly a second processor, I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be able to handle a virtualised version of SBS2003 and a couple of additional VMs.

The complication is the LTO drive. I’m not going to be able to get rid of it for a while yet.
 
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A new box will be the most likely outcome.

I was just exploring a possible option as the PE 2900 is massively underutilised at the moment.

There are other servers onsite but they aren’t really relevant to the question.
 
It's all generally as I thought and probably not worth the hassle.

It would have been easier to get approval to upgrade the existing hardware compared to getting a complete new box.
 
One other option I was toying with was to buy a new box with a reasonable, but not excessive, specification and transfer the SBS2003 instance (and the LTO) onto it. This would then free up the PE 2900 for more interesting things.

So ignoring the SBS2003/LTO issue are there any opinions on using a PE 2900 III as a virtualisation platform?

This particular machine is spec’d with:-

Single E5420 Xeon
4GB ram
PERC 6i
8 x 73GB 15K.4 SAS drives
2 years of remaining onsite warranty

It would obviously need significantly more ram, but taking it up to 20GB wouldn’t cost too much.

It would be running 3 VMs for the moment, two of which wouldn’t impose much load at all, and one which would be running some small but occasionally busy SQL Server DBs.

FWIW if SBS2003 was capable of using significantly more than 4GB of ram there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
 
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