[patrickgzill]

What I don't understand is that if the servers are 6 years old, why not migrate the old bad hardware to exactly the same OS, as virtual machines running under the virtualization platform of your choice?

A 6 year old server would have a max RAM capacity of say 32GB, you can get a newish 64GB RAM system for what, $3k or so?

In such a case, migration is basically a few shell scripts plus rsync from old hardware to new VM. You rsync a couple of times until the rsync takes very little time, then turn off services; do a final rsync; turn on services on the new VM, swap IP addresses and test.

You can even run FreeBSD/Xen on top of Solaris XVM, right?