For some time now I have been playing around with VMware's Free Product of VMWare Server. 
I have found it very useful for a few testing scenarios, and also for a couple or DR Purposes. I have also found it very handy when I needed to do a restore of our Domain from the Year End backup for 2003, since then we have upgraded to Windows 2003 and also got rid of the old kit!
We had a need several months ago to do a restore of Exchange from 2003 as some one had deleted and email and apparently it was very important!, Well at the end of 2003 we were still running Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 on HP NetServers. The DC was an LC2000r and the Exchange Server was an LH3000r, well as it was requested in September 2007 all our unused HP kit had been disposed of or cannibalised for spare parts! Unlike Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 is very picky on what hardware you restore it on to, so I thought that I would try restoring on to Virtual Servers. I had a Dell PowerEdge SC 440 with 2 HDD's in it, 1 x 160GB and 1 x 500GB. so I installed the Host OS on it just a basic Windows 2003 server and then installed VMWare Server 1.0.3 on (can be downloaded for free from Vmware).
I created 2 Virtual Servers on the host, and then restored the servers as I would have done if they had been physical and to my astonishment the servers booted up with no problems what so ever, ok so there was the slight problem of the partition numbers not matching up to those in the boot.ini file, but that was fixed by creating a boot disk loading up windows and then modifying the file accordingly.
