DL360 G5 to G7

[Denskie]

Hi,

One of our terminal servers currently can't support the  load of 21 users working on it.

I suspect a hardware issue however the server is out of warrenty.

We will virtualize all of our terminal servers in the future, unfortunatly this server will not last that long.

The TS now in use is a DL360 G5 with 1 2Ghz processor, 14GB RAM and 2 72GB SAS drives on RAID 0+1

OS: Server 2008R2

We recently upgrades our ESX servers as there was a very nice discount on them. Memory upgrade for the old one had almost the same price as getting a complete new server with the required amount of ram.

I would like to migratie the TS to the old ESX server.

The old ESX server has these specs: 2 2.5Ghz processors, 36GB RAM, no harddisks.

I'm not sure what the exact hardware differences are so, can i simply remove the drives from the G5, put them in the G7 and boot it?

I know that it is possoble for the RAID settings, but will i need to reinstall Windows or worse, damage windows while trying?

[waaronb]

The array controller on the G5 is probably the P400, and on the G7 it's probably the P410.  I've done some migrations where I moved the drives from a G5 to a G6, and from a G6 to a G7, and it worked okay, so I think you can probably go from a G5 to a G7.  The P410 shouldn't have any problems seeing the array configuration on the disks.

Backup your system just in case, of course.

As far as Windows is concerned, I don't think there are enough differences between a DL360 G5 and a DL360 G7 to cause driver issues.  The array driver will work okay.  I think both of those have the Broadcom Multifunction NICs installed (maybe the 373 on the G5 and 382 on the G7) and the driver is the same.

You *will* need to reconfigure the network settings (IP addresses, etc) since it sees all of the NICs as new.  If you're using NCU at all, you should probably remove any NIC groups and then set it up again once you've moved to the new server.

If I were you, I'd want to have more memory and CPU power for a terminal server, probably more drive space, but if it's working for you now on the G5 (just barely), then the G7 should give you a littel wiggle room, but not much.

Oh, you may need to re-activate Windows since it'll see the new hardware.  Normally that's not an issue but since you have a TS license you should just be aware of that since it adds time to the total process.