If your organization is still running Windows NT in its environment,
you’re more than likely running it on older hardware, which can be much more
prone to failure than today’s newer, faster, and more reliable servers. You may
also have purchased an expensive hardware maintenance contract for your older
NT servers to protect against the inevitable problems with aging hardware.

Of course, now that Microsoft has discontinued support for
Windows NT, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to upgrade your
systems. One way you can buy yourself a little time is to move your NT servers
to virtual machines hosted by VMware or Virtual Server 2005. In addition to
providing the company with more time before eradicating NT, this approach can
also help save money and provide a higher degree of reliability.

In the past, in order to take advantage of VMware or other
virtual server products, you still needed to reload a server—virtual or not—and
migrate its contents. Or, you had to rely on complicated tools, such as Microsoft’s
Virtual Server Migration Toolkit, to help automate the transition.

Now, thanks to a new tool from PlateSpin called PowerP2V,
you can automatically migrate almost any server from the confines of its
physical hardware to a running virtual server, and the process requires very
little manual intervention. While it isn’t quite
as simple as the “drag-and-drop” process touted by PlateSpin’s
marketing department, it’s not too difficult either.

As long as your physical Windows NT server meets certain
minimum requirements, such as Windows NT Service Pack 6a, and you don’t need
specialized hardware to perform a particular service on your physical server,
you can migrate the machine with ease. In addition, your savings can quickly
add up when you start looking at how much it would cost to manually reload a
system to make it virtual.

For more information about PowerP2V, check out the PlateSpin Web site.

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