What to do with spare xeon server. Advice please.

[dhicks]

With 2GB of ram? Also given that it's got 75G drives ( I suspect that's actualy 72G ) they will be Paralel Scsi rather than SAS so the backplane won't take SATA. Chances are also that the CPU is not up to running a modern Hypervisor.

 

Slightly older thread, but still valid: you can run paravirtualised instances of Linux under Xen (and / or XenServer) without hardware support for virtualisation on an older CPU. Ideally, you'd want to fill the server with as much RAM as possible (you can probably get it second-hand off eBay for a bargin price now) and you're right, you'd probably need to add a separate controller for SATA drives. Of course, these days I'd go for 4TB drives. It probably wouldn't be the best-performing file server ever, but it would probably be reasonable enough as a large backup server or similar.

[3s-gtech]

Yes you can use 2003 as the OS on the second DC - you won't be able to raise the schema beyond 2003 though so you'll lose a couple of features.

 

Stupid past-self - you won't be able to raise the FUNCTIONAL LEVEL. The schema will raise fine. That taught you. If only the edit button worked three years later.

[laserblazer]

I'm playing with a Dell T840 with a Xeon processor. I was planning to use it for video editing. I've put 64 bit Windows 7 on. Trouble is the fan is louder than a 747 taking off!