I have been given a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with dual 2.8 Xeon, 6gigs ram, and 5x75gig SCSI drives (32 bit archtecture only). The main objective of this is to replace my current dedicated linux server that has a single core AMD 1500 with 512mb of ram and an 80gig IDE drive.
Currently on the AMD1500 I only have linux running with 6 Virtual Hosts.
On the new server I am running Win2003 Server with VMServer. I have a linux guest VM running that I am migrating the virtual domains over to. I also have a development linux guest VM and a win2003 vm to play around with.
Long term am I better off with this old dual cpu 32 bit server architecture or selling it (~$350 or so) and building a brand new system using desktop 64 bit architechture. For the money I could build a 3.0ghz AM2 dual core, 4 gigs ram, and dual 500g Sata drives in a raid 1 mirror array.
How will the older server handle several VMs versus a newer desktop running the same applications?
How will system stability be on the server versus the desktop?
How often will components or drives fail in the server versus the desktop?
I know I occasionally have junk go bad in my personal desktop. I have also had server failures in my AMD1500 dedicated server and had to restore from backup (it is just a desktop also).
Any other advice anyone has is appretiated!