How to ensure the operation of outdated systems in DC?

Although SaaS and other cloud services are now widely available on the market, many organizations still use outdated hardware platforms and software. Every year their support causes more and more difficulties and the IT administrator has to look for outdated software drivers and solve compatibility issues with new OS and hardware. Data centers recommend the following solutions to their customers.

Replacing hardware with VirtualBox

If the company has software in its assets that runs on Windows XP or Linux systems with an expired support period, then the virtualization program of the OS and VirtualBox applications will help to run outdated environments on modern hardware. It has a built-in default RDP plug-in with support for the remote desktop protocol, which allows users to connect to it remotely. VirtualBox is more suited to the virtualization of legacy software versions than QEMU / KVM or other more advanced hypervisors.

PAE for 32-bit systems to add more RAM

Most modern systems use 64-bit processors, but there may be situations when you need to deploy 32-bit versions of Windows, but they can use no more than 4 GB of RAM. In such cases, to improve performance, you need to enable 36-bit memory addressing in Windows (PAE) and this will allow the processor to use up to 64 GB of physical memory.

Replacing PATA hard drives with DOM

Manufacturers produced drives with PATA or IDE connections, even after standardizing the SATA serial port in 2000. It completely pushed out PATA from the market in 2008, therefore the age of almost any disk with this interface is at least 10 years. Some professionals mockingly call them "rotating rust" and recommend immediately replacing them with newer ones. Outdated PATA disks can be replaced with SSDs in the Disk-on-module format. The use of DOM gives an additional advantage in the sense that due to the lack of cables and compactness, they are directly connected to the motherboard. To transfer data from one disk to another, it can be cloned using the Clonezilla program.