First experiences with Virtual Server 2003
In case you've missed it, Microsoft has a product in the works called Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. It seems like a good solution to a mess I find myself in at the end of each server lease cycle. Instead of having some number of physical servers that I need to migrate "stuff" off of and on to the replacement machine, I should be able to move all of my stuff at once to a virtual machine environment, then when the lease is up, I just copy the Virtual Machine files to the new server and go. So far the experience working with it has been ok. I'd prefer an MMC-style controller than than a WebPage but that's pretty minor. Something really should be done to allow the release of keyboard and mouse before installing the VM Additions. These are pretty minor issues, though.
The big question that I'm looking for answers on is: Suppose I'm running my VMs on an Intel chipset with a CPU (family 15, Model 2, Stepping 7) and my new server is also an Intel chipset, but a different family, model or stepping? Can I plug and go? What has to change to make me reinstall the base OS. If I have to do that, I'm almost no better off.
A word towards setting expectations too: each VM can use exactly one CPU in the 2005 version. Thats fine for some server apps (IIS6 for simple web sites, for example) but not so good for CPU demanding uses like SQL Server.