@hrvojer My posts above will help you get out of a technical debt trap that you are currently pitfall-trap trapped in!
If you do this, it will drastically help to reduce your operational costs. Maintaining an old legacy stack like this—where every component from the hypervisor to the database engine is completely End of Life (EOL)—is scandalously expensive. It sucks up valuable engineering hours in firefighting, forces you into hyper-expensive custom support agreements, and leaves you exposed to massive downtime risks—which is a nightmare scenario, especially if your other organizational costs are going up at the same time.
I highly recommend framing this to your leadership using these exact terms:
The Pitfall Trap: Explain that the infrastructure team is currently stuck at the bottom of a pitfall trap of compounding technical debt due to a historical lack of a system-wide overhaul.
The Rescue Plan: Make it clear that trying to find deprecated, 2018-era VM tools is just a short-term sticking plaster fix that buries the team deeper. What you need is a definitive rescue plan—a clean overhaul that decouples your data layer, migrates you to a modern OS/database (or an open-source alternative), and permanently lifts you out of the trap. As well as other dependencies - systems that communicate with that one, but won’t be able to without upgrade or migration, even with configuration tweaks.
The Linux Performance & Driver Advantage: If you choose to migrate your database server to Linux (running PostgreSQL or MariaDB), you gain massive performance, reliability, and security boosts. Unlike Windows, you will completely bypass the fragile legacy Citrix xenvbd.sys driver ecosystem. On Linux, the paravirtualized storage and network drivers are compiled directly into the Linux kernel. The only thing you need to install separately is the modern, official XCP-ng guest agent—which Vates has beautifully rewritten as an ultra-secure, memory-safe Rust-language agent. This gives you a lean, stable database foundation that can handle heavy memory allocations and high I/O workloads without ever breaking a sweat.
