Running Legacy Workloads on vSphere

Here is an interesting video from Andy where he took the time to show the history of upgrading through each version of MS Windows by actually doing that inside a VMware VM!

Sure this video is interesting from the “wow, I remember that  OS…how far we’ve come” aspect. But I find it more interesting from the “a current version of VMware could still run that old OS” aspect. I have a colleague who’s client “upgraded” their control system for their assembly line not by paying the $100,000’s upgrade price to install new hardware and move to the latest OS and controller software version, but by paying a few $10,000’s to P2V the existing controller systems to VMs and then run them all on two modern mid-range servers. These systems didn’t demand a lot of performance, they just needed to work. The old version of the OS and controller software weren’t broken, just the model in which it all operated (physical servers versus VMs).

One of my clients even has a “convalescence ESX cluster” where they move old apps to so they can die a slow hardware oversubscription death.  These are apps that either can’t be tracked back to the owner but see an occasional blip of activity or are apps that the owners are steadfastly refusing to EOL. So rather than keep them running on old servers taking up rack space and excess power in the data center, they built a special ESX cluster just to run them all on. They are available and work when needed and it was the path of least resistance for the IT staff.

So, what Legacy workloads do you have running in a VMware VM in your datacenter?  Leave a comment and let’s see what is the most obscure OS / Software Version we can find.  Don’t worry…you can leave it anonymously to protect the guilty…

(Thanks goes out to @herrod for the pointer to the video.)