Anyone know if its possible to upgrade the hardware on a
Windows NT 4.0 Server without reinstalling the OS?

Jon wrote:
What hardware is going to be upgraded?

Ghostrider wrote:
Sorry...meant to have expanded further. That is, from
what CPU to what new CPU? How different are the mobos,
esp. chipsets. What about memory?

Ghostrider wrote:
You can usually do this kind of an upgrade, but whereas
I am quite comfortable doing it with a client, I prefer
to just reinstall the OS+drivers+software on a server
from scratch.

Basically, what you do (after a full backup, of course) is to
simplify the hardware-dependent aspsects of the current machine
as much as possible. For example, switch away from any
proprietary video driver and just use the basic VGA or SGVA
driver. After the motherboard swap you can start installing
the drivers appropriate for the new video, NIC, sound, etc.

A list of things that can be a pain in the butt when trying
to do a motherboard swap has got to be topped by trying to
go from integrated SCSI or RAID controllers on one motherboard
to whatever controllers are going to be used with the new
motherboard. If you have a non-integrated PCI or PCI-X
controller plugged into a slot on the old motherboard that
you can move to the new motherboard, you have a good chance
of making things work. If you are facing a change in SCSI
or RAID controllers, I wish you the best of luck.

I have found that the type of CPUs you are moving from/to
doesn't matter much - assuming that all involved are
x86-32 chips of one kind or another. If you are, for
example, going from a dualie to a quad, you might want
to try removing a couple of CPUs until the migration is
done and then add the 2 extra processors back in.

RAM also doesn't matter much so long as the new system
will have at least as much. If it has less, then some
things for which you created RAM dependencies might not
perform the way you are used to, but they should still
run.

Before doing anything, make sure you have all the drivers
that you will need for any components that will be changed -
which typically include everything that is integrated on
the new motherboard - such as video, sound, and NIC. In
this day and age of decreasing NT support by hardware vendors,
this can be a tricky part of the process.

You might also want to see if there is a server vendor in
your area that will not only sell you a new server, but will
also migrate the current server onto the new one. If
totally rebuilding the OS+drivers+software on the server is
not an option, this kind of contracted out migration can be
the safest route. A warrantied migration by specialists can be
vastly cheaper than dealing with all of the things that can
go wrong if you try to do it yourself and your mission-critical
server goes down at a bad time. IBM, HP, and Compaq all used
to offer this kind of service, but its been a long time since
I've used it and I don't know if they still do. Heck, the
last time I used a service like that was from Digital (DEC)
just before they were ingested by Compaq.

Don't know yet. We're running dual PII's @ 350MHZ. I'm
getting a bit nervous b/c the setup is almost 5 years old
now . . . something's gonna give. Any suggestions?

anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com wrote:
I originally thought you might thinking of upgrading something
ancient like a 1 GHz PIII dualie. Your actual system is prehistoric
rather than merely ancient. This is a no brainer: forget about
upgrading - time for a replacement.

As a rule of thumb, it is seldom cost effective to upgrade a
system when the hardware cost of the upgrade exceeds 1/3 of
the price of a new system. You are looking at a replacing
at the very least the motherboard, processors, RAM, and power
supply - which is probably half of the cost of a new system
right there. Don't be surprised if the new mobo or PSU also
necessitates a case replacement. And if the hard drives
are even half as old as the rest of the system, it is time
for them to be replaced too - which in turn means that you
might as well take the opportunity to upgrade the SCSI/RAID
controllers. So little would be left of the original machine
that you would have effectively done a complete replacement
anyway - except that method leaves you without and warranty
or support that you would have gotten by simply buying a new
machine.

If you can't afford to have your old server down for a day or
two while you migrate everything to a new one, you really should
talk to someone from one of the big OEMs like IBM. They have
programs to sell you the replacement server and migrate everything
from the old machine onto the new one for you.

PIII is ancient? :-|

Our most powerful server is a dual 1GHz PIII; we only bought it recently!

(It's our database server. It has 3 Oracle databases. [Only one of those
is for production use; the other 2 are "test" databases with very low
usage.] We've had intermittent network issues with it, but basically it
seems to work real good.)

Now, the *other* servers... I'd say those need upgrading! Some of our
*workstations* have better specs than them...

Invisible wrote:
It is in the sense that if you need more horsepower than
your P3 can provide then it virtually always makes more
sense to buy a system based on newer processors instead
of trying to upgrade the old P3 system.

If it has enough horsepower to do what you need it to do,
what do you care about my opinion or anyone else's ? If
it is brand new you should be able to get a few years out
of it before you start having to worry about component failures.

However, if it wasn't doing the job for you, then forget
about upgrading it - get a new system. A Xeon or Opteron
system, by contrast, would be much more likely to be
economically feasible to upgrade.

FWIW, when it comes to giving advice for new server configuration
I still often recommend 1 GHz P3 systems when it is clear that a
2.x or 3.x GHz Xeon system is overkill. More often than not, a 1 GHz
P3 dualie can do the job for both a lower system cost and a much
lower power consumption cost.

I also tell people to forget about buying new systems with 1.26 GHz
or 1.4 GHz Tualatins. That drives the price up into or past the
1.4 GHz Opteron range, and the Opteron is the clear performance
winner *and* gives you a feasible upgrade path.


That is another thing that often irks me: the way a lot of people
insist that their servers have to be the most powerful systems on
the network. If, for example, you have a small architectural or
engineering firm it is quite easy to see that you might be best
off with a lot of horsepower on the desktops and something a
*lot* less powerful as a server for your small firm.

Invisible wrote:
Normally, in a working environment that has servers that are *servers*,
and workstations that are there for doing the *work*, *all* workstations
should have more horsepower than the servers will ever need...

(it may be different, though, if the servers get a lot of the workload
as such, but even then, I/O speed usually matters more than raw
processing power!)


Helmut
--
All typos © My Knotty Fingers Ltd. Capacity Dept.

I just thought 300MB of RAM is a little bit small for a server that's a
fileserver *and* an email server... If it had more RAM, hopefully it
would have more space to buffer some of that data and do less physical IO...

On the other hand, it seems to be running bearably fast ATM, so I guess
I'll leave it for a while...

OK, that's fair enough...

Cool.

OK, how stupid am I? I've never even *heard* of either of those...
That's not good.

I just thought a fileserver should probably have a tad more RAM, that's
all. (Buffer more data and save IO.) Of course, without trying it to see
what difference it makes...