Design question/problem

[Tim Russell]

I'm using apache and PHP to write a web interface to a Mysql 5.x database for tracking changes to servers and network equipment. I'll keep this as short as I can.

Basically, there are about 4 tables I'm concerned about.
1. Hardware table - serial numbers, asset tags, manufacturer, CPU, Memory, etc.
2. Software Config - operating system, ip address, serial number,etc. I join this to the hardware table based on serial number.
3. Virtual machines - basically a combination of the hardware and software config tables.
4. Maintenance log - log of changes to servers (virtual and physical)

I'd like to be able to view the state of a server when it was entered into the maintenance table. If I associate it to a record in the hardware/software tables...when memory is upgraded in a server, the log entries for that server would no longer show the old memory size. Can I just dump the current server config into each maintenance log record? This doesn't seem like a good idea but I'm not sure what else to do. I let records be tagged inactive instead of deleted so I preserve history when a server is removed...but when I edit a server record a new row isn't created so the info for the maintenance record changes.

Finally, should my virtual servers be in the same table as regular servers? I think I can make it work but I'm just not sure the design is very good.