by Alex Walker.
If it's a powerful machine, you could look at setting it up as a virtual server host. That's what we have.
When we launched our new Moodle in 2011, we went with two brand new blades (two 6-core CPUs, 48GB RAM). We turned our old Blackboard servers (which are still pretty good, but the hardware is no longer supported) into virtual server hosts.
We have several virtual servers running this way. We have a WordPress blogging server, an Apache Solr server for college-wide search, a BigBlueButton server (Ubuntu 10.04), and a Moodle development server, all running off our old Blackboard server.
