Yesterday I migrated two servers at work to a new machine. The old machines were pretty underpowered: a Pentium III 1 Ghz system (with 384 MB RAM if I remember correctly) and a Pentium 4 system. The new machine is a Dell Poweredge R410 with a Xeon E5504 processor, 12 GB RAM and a PERC H700 RAID controller (which is actually a LSI MegaSAS 9260) with 3 750 GB SATA disks in RAID 5. The hardware is pretty nice (although I am not happy at all with the way Dell treats its customers, so I will rather prefer other vendors in the future, but maybe more about that in a later post).
The old servers were running Debian Lenny, while the new server runs Debian Squeeze, which is frozen since yesterday. That was a nice coincidence. The new server actually hosts three virtual machines using the Linux KVM virtualization system. One of them hosts the website http://wise.vub.ac.be, a second VM hosts a file server, and a third VM is the gateway for a small internal network.
The migration went pretty well, except for the smaller problems which you can always expect with such things, for example a Java web application which had hard-coded host names which had changed. The update to PHP 5.3 caused some compatibility problems which I already fixed before the migration itself: Dokuwiki had to be updated to a recent version in order to not show any warnings. There was also a website based on Joomla 1.0, which is actually not supported anymore. As updating it to a recent version was not really an option, I found some posts on the web on how to fix the errors I was seeing and cooked up a simple patch.
The new server is using 140 Watts most of the time. Keeping in mind that in the future it will also replace a third old server, that will probably be a nice reduction of power consumption compared to the old situation.