Hi,

I have 2 old Dell PowerEdge 7250 servers that are in good working condition. Both have dual Itaniums, 4GB of RAM and 3 x 136GB SCSI drives with a MegaRAID supported RAID card. Question is, what can I do with them??

The servers are pretty big but they can only take 3 drives, which is a bit disappointing for a 4U unit. However we do have a 17TB iSCSI SAN so storage isn't too much of a problem.

I was thinking of using UML (User Mode Linux) or similar and virtualising for internal use, but with them being Itanium powered I'm a little unsure of what software would support it. Any ideas would be appreciated.

I think that it's good idea to be ruthless, and only deploy to the extent that you can support the hardware and software. Consolidating workloads makes it even more important that you are able to deal with the inevitable hardware failures and software bugs. Itanium immediately makes me worry about expensive parts and more software problems (due to the smaller amount of users and testing).

The combination of dropping prices and ever more powerful hardware means that old machines are now often just not worth resurrecting - we probably now have one unsupported but usable server out of use per running box, because the new and supported machines have more than enough capacity to deal with every service that we need. Our department literally can't find any work for unsupported servers that would be useful enough to justify running them, yet non-critical enough that we can afford to have an outage whenever the hardware starts to fail, so they just keep piling up.