question

Being on VM gives you some advantages with snapshots, vmotion, etc for high availability. A down fall can be around the complexities of licensing. I have yet to get a consistent response on how to properly license SQL on VM even from two Microsoft reps. Another down fall of SQL on VM is shared resources. Depending what else is on the host, it can impact your performance. With VM's you share the available CPU, memory, network card, etc. When you have a dedicated stand alone box, your hardware is your hardware. No need to worry about some other process sucking up the available bandwidth on the NIC card, or running a full virus scan while also performing a defrag on the hard disk killing the disk subsystem. In the end it really all depends on the system and what your requirements are. I have a lot of QA and Dev on virtual and all production physical. I do some consulting where the shop is 100% virtual. I would like to point out a question I asked awhile back. Lots of good info you are looking for in there. [Why Virtualize SQL Servers]( http://ask.sqlservercentral.com/questions/21257/why-virtualize-sql-servers)