I have a long term plan to move my email/domain server from Redhat 7.1 to Ubuntu. By long term plan I mean I've been meaning to do it for years and have never quite got round to it...

At the same time I want to move from having two servers in the garage to one server in the house somewhere. I have two servers at the moment because one is an old desktop machine running Redhat for my mail/domains and the other is an old server with a 50GB RAID5 array for my main file share running Windows 2000 Server.

My plan is to take a two step process. First I will build a new machine for it using Ubuntu and software RAID1. That will become my new file server and I'll also run a small Windows server VMWare image on it for some Windows stuff.

In the first instance I'm planning on just virtualising my Redhat machine and running that under VMWare (the Redhat powered server only has 8GB of disc).

In the second stage I'll add a VMWare image also running Ubuntu, which I'll gradually migrate my email/domain to, finally being able to upgrade my anti-spam measures in the process.

I intend to keep the email/domain Ubuntu "server" as virtual going forward. I think will make it far easier to manage, I'll be able to migrate it to new hardware easily, do full backups without hassle etc etc

Does anyone else take this Ubuntu under Ubuntu approach or foresee any problems with it ?

P.S. I've been very lucky with my Redhat setup, it has been in the garage plugging away for about 7 years now, with its single 8GB disk 99% full for most of the last three years. I hardly dare talk about it for fear that I'll anger the Gods of hardware failure and bring the disk read head crashing down.