My company is considering virtualization as a solution for replacing a legacy server (MS Windows NT 4.0 SP6a) that's used to monitor industrial process controls. The process is medical device sterilization and so is critical, failure intolerant and costly. The alternative to virtualization would be to purchase new hardware, new OS, update several applications, rewrite customized code and revalidate to meet regulatory (FDA) requirements. This would be very costly and perhaps unnecessary since we'd probably be perfectly happy with the functionality of the existing software for the forseeable future.
I'm interested in hearing from anyone who's done similar projects with success and also if anyone can enlighten me with respect to pitfalls of virtualizing legacy systems.
