If you want a virtual environment, witch in my experience is really easy to administer, you need some sort of SAN or iSCSI environment. Then you have a base for attaching the needed computing power to this storage solution. It will be costly to start up, mostly be course of the rather powerful switches you need to get. Those are easy 10K a piece.
We just set up a brand new virtual environment at my work (university it department serving about 5k people), the trick is really to get the infrastructure in place, network connectivity, and backbone/power redundancy etc. Then we are adding R710 Dell boxes, with 50GB ram(we are upgrading all 5 of them to 128GB next year) and 2x Quad core Xeons, those are cheap, only about 7k a piece. The processing power of those new Nahelem Xeons are awesome! Can definitely recommend.
For a not to expensive SAN i would recommend Dell's Equilogic boxes, they have all the new features, while being robust and built redundant (2 storage controllers, psu's etc), the basic box with 40TB is about 70k.

Since the main concern in my eyes are your aging hardware, you need to migrate one way or the other. Maybe just P2V'ing the old stuff to a vm is not desirable, if you need to update all software. Otherwise it is a easy way to move your old server in a convenient and safe way.

good luck.

Is Ian M. Banks!! He is writing some of the best Sci-Fi these days, one of he's latest is "Matter" wikipedia, do yourself a favor and read all of he's novels, they are so invigorating for the genre.

This is exactly the reason why, we at my Internet cafe, have used nvidia for the last 9 years. I really want to see nice competition to nvidia, just to get new products faster, but....... really they need to make unified driver model like nvidia, and actually strive to make it work on ALL platforms, before they will get more market share.

Right now, it is only the people who just see benchmarks and buy. The rest of us can then enjoy a 100% stable system with nvidia, thanks. Having a 8800GT on third year now, is still a thrill.. and i run all the newest games in 1920x1280. (mostly playing rpg and strategy games though, no fps's)

No need for sarcasm, I was just happy to see the news, it is the first time i have gotten a hardware upgrade like that for free.

Well, i just got a 160GiB G2 less than a month ago, so this is surely really nice, thanks Intel!
It was already very nice, and it did not take much time to get used to the awesome speed of things, especially when I use vmware workstation with ubuntu to administer my nix boxes from. It starts in 2 seconds, and resume the vm in afew seconds aswell, really great for that!
I hope the update process is not to difficult, and data destructive... maybe i should read TFA?! :)

Seriously, even the former COD World at War, had sucky dedicated support, as they officially only made a windows version, the linux server was community created.., and i never got it to work. I mean, why can they not learn from the most success full games out there (half-life!) that had a half-life on about 10 years be course they made really good linux server support, created a really nice open mod system and generally was some jolly nice lads.

Somehow I have a feeling the pc gaming industry is trying to screw themself over.. with steam leading the way followed closely by Activision.
I have a cyber cafe in denmark, we have been in the pc gaming business since '97, and it is getting worse and worse to make new games work properly. Steam is playing a big part here, as we have a cafe license from them, and are locked in.. well fine, it works okay. But new games coming out on steam like "Dawn of War 2", we can not make work with our cafe steam accounts. No we have to make new accounts etc.. it is just so messed up.. arrrrrrrgggg

"World's Fastest Indian" - just really liked that movie, it had such a nice chill-out rhythm to it.

You really have a point, it has been pretty useless lately...

You are on track of something here.. i only use cash to buy marijuana, anything else - credit card.

And just to support your post, it would be unwise to forget any mmopg, that are ALL running on pc's only.

If anyone of you have a large collection of music and video's, and use windows 7 with WMP, you will notice how the system still hangs itself outright when it indexes time after time after time.......... i know, maybe i have a good lot of media stuff, but still the OS is not aware of say a MPC i have open watching a movie. So yes, it will start indexing again, and make the movie stutter. The thing that i could track it to, was that wmpnetwork part, was indexing all my stuff to be searchable for my nonexistant networked pc's who allso supposedly would be playing from my pc. So i am now in a lucky position, that MS have made WMP uninstallable, now that its gone, i am really liking the OS okay. But i could imagine they should fix the issue with the system not recognizing a video bieng played by another program, be course it sucks as it is.

One of the things they plottet around was the creation of skynet, and that is really interesting. And obviously it is great with some good action in between, for us addicts!

Hey, That was a very interesting read m8, thanks.. i had no idea there was any such things in the move. As a casual smoker of weed, i for one would like our politicians to open they bloody eyes for once and realize we need some other approach than the current in ALL countryes.. not just USA or one or 2 european countryes. If not legalizing it, atleast decriminalize.. it makes so much sence!