Using VMWare as a backup/disaster recovery solution

Recently we had a customer with some legacy hardware lose a hard disk in a RAID array. Not really a major issue, but this hardware was fairly old, so finding a suitable replacement drive became an issue for them. They realized that they did not have any backups of the server, and if it did completely fail, their contact center would be seriously degraded.
We needed to come up with a fast, reliable solution to backup this server and allow for a very fast recovery if it did indeed fail. The server is an application server, so the files are basically static. No real day to day changes that need to be backed up.
I have used VMWare Player on and off for running Linux distros and even a small Asterisk system. So the thought came to me, "Hey, it would be cool if I could convert their old Windows 2000 Server into a Virtual Machine and run it using VMWare if the physical server dies".
Well, what do you know...VMWare actually makes a product that will convert a physical system to a Virtual Machine for you. The best part is that the conversion tool is freely available on their website. Since VMWare Player is also free, this ends up being a free disaster recovery solution.
I proposed the solution to the customer, and we decided to give it a try. We were able to sucessfully create an image of the Windows 2000 Server (and do it while the server was running - no down time here). We then brought the server down and fired up the virtual machine on another server. One small snag is an issue with the scsiport.sys driver in Windows 2000. As I always like to say, "Google is your friend.". A quick search led me to a soltuion and some good information on converting Windows 2000 systems.
It worked like a charm once we got it started up. The rest of the systems in the solution never knew the difference, and the application runs just fine.
Their IT Guy even commented that we could probably run the entire solution in virtual machines.
Here's the links to the products I used:
1. VMWare Converter: http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/overview.html
2. VMWare Virtual Disk Mount Utility: http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/diskmount_ws_v55.html
3. VMWare Player: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

The customer likes the solution enough that they will be converting 40 other servers to Virtual Machine images to be used for disaster recovery. If you think about it, it's pretty slick. I can have a server completely fail and be back up and running in the time it takes to boot the virtual image. We're talking a matter of minutes to recover.