I'll chime in and offer an alterntive not suggested up to this point. If the primary purpose is for a PDC/File Storage, why not put those spare cycles to work by adding some virtual machines onto the system (VMWare or MS Virtual PC)?
I usually make one partition, install W2K Server and VMWare on the physical box. After that, I create virtual machines for the application server types that I want to dabble with. I've had 4 virtual machines running on top of a host (physical machine) without any stability issues and can shut them down, suspend them, swap them out and boot-up/restore other virtual machine images.
The virtual machines can be booted on other VM installs (different hardware) without any changes and yes Domino runs just fine within a VM.
Dedicating physical boxes for one purpose is old school. Consolidating machines and maximizing hardware resources with VMs is the way to go IMHO. You get the flexibility of installing different O/S's with each VM and you can also model a client's configuration on your own system using the VMs without 'raiding' your other hardware.
I regulary bring the VMs on the road and have Linux and Win2003 server VMs running on my laptop which is XP Professional. VMs make demos a snap where you have n-tier solutions that typically involve different platforms.
Ghosting an image is not the same, as the hardware must match from machine to machine.
And no.... I don't work for VMWare or M$.
It may be too big a leap right now, but you may want to try it out.
I'll chime in and offer an alterntive not suggested up to this point. If the primary purpose is for a PDC/File Storage, why not put those spare cycles to work by adding some virtual machines onto the system (VMWare or MS Virtual PC)?
I usually make one partition, install W2K Server and VMWare on the physical box. After that, I create virtual machines for the application server types that I want to dabble with. I've had 4 virtual machines running on top of a host (physical machine) without any stability issues and can shut them down, suspend them, swap them out and boot-up/restore other virtual machine images.
The virtual machines can be booted on other VM installs (different hardware) without any changes and yes Domino runs just fine within a VM.
Dedicating physical boxes for one purpose is old school. Consolidating machines and maximizing hardware resources with VMs is the way to go IMHO. You get the flexibility of installing different O/S's with each VM and you can also model a client's configuration on your own system using the VMs without 'raiding' your other hardware.
I regulary bring the VMs on the road and have Linux and Win2003 server VMs running on my laptop which is XP Professional. VMs make demos a snap where you have n-tier solutions that typically involve different platforms.
Ghosting an image is not the same, as the hardware must match from machine to machine.
And no.... I don't work for VMWare or M$.
It may be too big a leap right now, but you may want to try it out.
Michael