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Lionel MMFlag for United States of America

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Dell 2800 Servers--2 identical systems, ecept fro hard disk drives

I have two Dell 2800's--one is dying and the other was bought for this very purpose to take over when the other one dies. "Only" difference is the number of and size of Hard Disk Drives. So my question is can I remove the production server drives and put them in the 2nd server--I believe there is someway with the RAID setup on these servers to tell it to get the RAID information from the hard disk drives and not the controller. Do I have that right? If yes how do I do that? If No, how do I do it in a different way?
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Subhashish Laha
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Is it a separate RAID controller or is it embedded in the motherboard.  If it's separate, perhaps you can remove the raid controller from the old box and install it in the new on.
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Its the embedded, on board perc 4e/d
The order of the drives means drive 0 on old becomes drive 0 on new and so on..right?
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Yes, you're correct. The Disk order should be same i.e. Disk 0 on old machine has to be Disk 0 on new machine.

Also, as you have the On board RAID controller - you just need to move the Disks.
On the VM way are you saying I can run the VMConverter and convert my Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server that is currently on a bad server to a VM and then transfer that VM to my good server? Then that VM can run on the good hardware and everything else will be as normal? On the good server I will need to install ESXi to run this VM? (This is like an operating system, something similar to Microsoft's Hyper-v?) And there are no costs involved because we really have no money (maybe some minimal expenses like larger hard disk drives maybe)?
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PowerEdgeTech--so if I move all 6 drives, and make sure each one is in the same slot as on the old server it will bootup as if it was on the damaged server? This is a production server--what runs this company and if it is lost we have backups but that will takes hours, if not days to re-create so I am looking for a sure thing please and thank you.
I would at least convert the server to a VM and save it to an external drive so that if you try to put the drives into the other server and it wipes all the data because the RAID card sees them as new drives you have an option.

ESXi is like Hyper-V but is completely free for small to medium usages as yours.

We have 5 to 7 servers running on our host and we aren't paying a dime. It is awesome and gives you so many more options. It is super simple to install ESXi on the good server and boot up the server after you converter it.

If you need help when you do it I can walk you through it.
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Thanks for the help on the question posed as well as the additional VM info--has been truly helpful--thanks.