Among the most cost effective things we can do for our clients is imagining new ways to use hardware they already have. Recently, at a prominent Nephrology Clinic in Denver, we were presented with just such an opportunity. This clinic had bought a small HP DL160 G5 for use as a test-bed for a developer. That developer left the organization and they had a server that was left to do nothing.

This is not an impressive piece of hardware, it had 4 GB of RAM (most laptops have more than that nowadays) and one quad core processor. The need arose for a new server and this server came right to our minds. Problem; it still had an operating system running on it with software that was accessed about once a month by a software company under contract with the clinic to maintain their EHR system. We decided that virtualization was the way to go.

We have a couple of options when it comes to no-cost hypervisors. Citrix’s Xen platform is a perfectly respectable bare metal hypervisor I have used and like. The public distributions of Red Hat and SuSe both come with a flavor of Xen, which is used by many major corporations. We decided on ESXi. This particular client already uses ESX 4.0 which consolidated four of their old physical servers, it was decided to keep the support and maintenance homologous. We installed ESXi 4.0 which is enterprise software provided 100% free by VMWare.

We convinced our client to buy some upgraded memory for the server, and $400 later we have a server with 14 GB of RAM capable of running at least 4 Windows, Linux, or UNIX operating systems. We project the physical hardware will last at least another 3 years.  In this case, we are running a Terminal Server which provides fast, secure, and reliable access to an Electronic Health Record system for the Nephrologists. As far as the server that had been running on it, it is now a virtual guest, using about 1/10th of the hardware resources available.