We have DBs on the 2000 and 2005 platform (fortunately the most important are now 2005). We also have one legacy app that is 7.0 and there is no money in the budget to upgrade it to 7.0. And we too are seeing the hardware question and support and such.

Our answer to that question? VMWare.

For legacy apps that don't need a "latest and greatest" and which probably aren't high on the I/O meter, VMWare seems to be an ideal solution. You just virtualize the original machine, run it on a VMWare server as a virtual machine, and you never have to worry about hardware or reinstalling it again. As long as the VMWare environment is up, it's never an issue, and worst case scenario is to re-load an older image file from backup and then reapply the latest DB backup. And the legacy app can just churn along to its heart's content for as long as needed. While the rest of the company lives on 2005. 2008 will be several years in the future if at all -- 3 year upgrade cycles? You kidding me?