Legacy hardware and Virtualization?

Question

I have a windows server running several other virtualized servers (database, web server, etc...) as we are migrating everything to this one server rather than the stack of old hardware that's on the verge of failure.

One of these boxes we simply cannot get rid of, it has legacy cards that we use for the telcom system and are out of production and very rare (if any others exist at all).

The hard-drive on this one legacy machine with the telcom cards is failing and we're about to replace that, but, is there a way I can configure the hardware cards in the computer to connect with a virtual system over the network?

What I'm after is still using the cards on the machine, with as little dependancy on the machine as required-- the hard drive should see almost no use, just in essence using the machine as a hardware extension just for the sake of those cards.

Any thoughts on this one?

Answer 1

Not across the network, but some virtualisation solutions (such as VM) allow you to connect PCI cards directly to a VM, as if they were physically in the VM. You could then install them in the virtualisation platform and run the VM inside that platform.

You may also want to consider looking forwards - what will you do if/when one of these cards fail?