[CentOS] VMWare Sandbox

I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if
vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.

My current server is RHEL3, which is getting dated, and I think that I
should refresh this server entirely in the move to ldap.
We need to have an ldap server for publishing email addresses for a
VPN for a nursing home that the upstream can harvest and we can browse
to send confidential patient records.

RHEL3 prollie won't cut it, so I'm considering moving to CentOS5.

If I get a nice working test environment working, I wondered about
running the server on VMWare, because the hardware will likely need to
be refreshed in 2 years anyways. Copying the vmware file and the data
to a new server would make for a fast upgrade.

Any feedback on what I am attempting to do here? Any other
recommendations on how I should tackle this?

Currently I'm using Samba 3 with passdb. It's nothing fancy, but it works.
We have about 20 XP machines here.

The server also hosts mail as well.

-- 
-=/>Thom