Paul Schnackenburg28 November 2008, 6:31 AM
Small Biz Big IT | When one of my small business clients needed to keep an old legacy application going, we virtualized it on an old PC so that it would still be available.
Server virtualization? That’s only for big companies isn’t it? Row after row of rack mounted servers, all magically reduced to a few files and stored on a few behemoths of really powerful physical servers.
Wrong – virtualization is a wonderful technology for small and big businesses alike and can be used to solve many different business issues. One of my clients is a small family owned business that manufacture machinery for nurseries and for fruit handling (www.kwautomation.com.au). Before I came on the scene over eight years ago they had a system for managing their manufacturing and keeping track of parts for machines called Dimas. This system runs on SCO Unix version 5 and is accessed through terminal emulation software (Netterm) on the clients.
The server running this system is getting “a bit” long in the tooth, 12 years and counting (way to go Unix!), a Pentium 1 box with 64 MB of RAM. Even though the system has long since been supplanted by a more modern Windows application, old customers call from time to time with spare parts enquiries.
The only way to find out this information is accessing Dimas.
SCO Unix isn’t exactly an easy platform to find support for in this day and age, nor is Dimas and the prospect of migrating this setup to new hardware wasn’t particularly attractive. So server virtualization seemed like the next logical choice. But how? If it had been an old Windows system, even NT4, there are many tools on the market, same for an older Linux platform.
First we tried using a Ghost backup image as the source but there were version issues, the old version that could do a backup of SCO Unix wasn’t recognised by the backup image tool from VMWare. Then the plan was to clone the OS and application on to another SCSI HDD and use that to transfer Dimas and all customisation onto a fresh installation of a virtual SCO server. And then the clone SCSI HDD broke beyond repair.
Time to get creative (rather than despair) – we installed a fresh copy of SCO Unix in a new virtual machine in VMWare workstation 6, ran this on a laptop on the customer site and used FTP to connect to the old, physical server. We used FTP to transfer all the content from the old server to another virtual HDD connected to the new virtual SCO server.
Several hours later, after digging around in arcane configuration menus and making configuration changes in a very old OS we had a working copy of the original server running in a virtual machine.
From here on it was pretty much smooth sailing: we installed VMWare Player 2.5 on a client workstation (the Windows Server is due to be replaced) and configured virtual networking with the same IP address as the old physical server. Then we had to change the password in the virtual server to match the Netterm password that the clients use to connect.
The moment of truth arrives and we start up Netterm on a client and are greeted with a working system! This is the power of OS virtualization – from old rusting box to a small application that can easily run on any PC.
Below, SCO Unix 5 in a virtual machine.
Thanks for help with this project goes to LLew Milne-Brownlie and James Macfarlane.