Sometimes we have a system that has to run for few more years (it was accounting system in our case - we have to keep it for three more years) but the hardware is quite aged and can crash at any moment. The new hardware is not supported by OS, so the only reasonable thing is to move to a virtual machine.

For the host I chose VMware server. I used this howto but the situation was a bit tricky because the system was not to be installed from scratch but instead moved from a working machine.

First, I booted with Linux live CD and used dd to make an image of the hard disk and transfer it to another computer. (of course you can plug another drive/pendrive/whatever and make the image localy; I just chose to upload it onto another server)

Then I created a new virtual machine in VMware. The machine had to be a version 4 machine and have ATA disk (slightly larger than the original one, to make sure I fit the image onto it) and bridged networking (NAT wouldn't do since we used IPX on the NW).

Having created the machine, I booted into it with Linux again and dumped the image back onto the (this time - virtual) disk.

Since the original server was SCSI based, I had to change the HD drivers to IDEATA and IDEHD so the system would see the disk.

For the network card - install drivers from http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/odi_ahsm_svr3x.exe

I also installed odi3g, but I'm not sure whether it was really needed or not.

The last important thing was to install NW4-IDLE.NLM and make it the first one loaded after mounting SYS:. Without it the VM consumes 100% of CPU time even if the server is not doing anything.

The original howto specifies some patches that should be added to your NW as well but I already had most of them.

Good luck!