Comment Re:DOS 3 entire OS (Score 1) 498
Anyways, I'm a consultant looking at their firewalls, and they have WAY too many, and I'm pushing this "new" thing of virtualization. So using Virtual PC, on XP I show how I can take their 5 firewalls and consolidate them to a single box.. And they are loving it as it's freed up almost an entire rack of crap hardware. Then they ask me to look at other 'easy targets' for virtualization, and I look at this desktop running Windows 95.. And yes, this old programmers desktop gets all the check orders from Oracle, and
You name it, payroll, orders, everything.
And it's on this Pentium 75 with a 200MB hard disk that when I listen to it, I can hear a definite "ping" noise from within the case.
So I power down the machine, pop the disk out, and xcopy the filesystem into another machine to then copy into Virtual PC. Once done, I put the original machine back in the data center to then finish up the Virtual PC to demo to the CIO on how great this thing is, and how I can preserve existing application configurations (bla bla bla bla).
I'm not kidding, as soon as I have the VM booting on my laptop, the DBA busts down the doors screaming that the check printing is down! (and naturally that since I touched it last, I must have killed it). So I had my VM going, I just put it on the network live, and suddenly I'm printing all the checks from my laptop... Everyone is happy as I have just saved them from an impending hardware disaster..!
Things go so well I ended up taking a full time job with them!
Anyways the moral is that 'living' systems have a hope of being restored as the media is new.... And don't let things 'run forever' in the corner as when they eventually fail as they always do it'll be catastrophic.
As you can tell I'm a big proponent of virtualization, I'd recommend people seriously think about it, as it provides a significantly easier route to constantly move systems to newer hardware, skipping many of these issues all together.