I'll tell you up front I used to be a sysadmin and VMware was the platform I used to administrate so I'm a tad biased. First, in regards to virtualizing SQL Server, you shouldn't be afraid of it as long as you understand virtualization and everything that goes along with it. There's a lot of resource abstraction and as a database administrator you need to know what's going on "underneath the covers" in your setup.

As someone mentioned Brent's posts (which are great), also check out Jonathan Kehayias' posts (http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jonathan_kehayias/archive/2010/11/22/virtualizing-sql-on-vmware-reference-list.aspx). Jonathan presented at a VMware event in Orlando about his experience in virtualizing OSI Restaurant's (read also: Outback Steakhouse) SQL Server environment. This allowed me to understand certain nuances and go ahead and do the same (carefully) in my environment at the time.

You mentioned clustering isn't supported in VMware, which is both true and not. You COULD setup a cluster but there's a lot of hassles. Nice thing about VMware is you can virtually "cluster" the VM itself using their High Availability component in vSphere (http://www.vmware.com/products/high-availability/overview.html). This basically lets you run a VM on two hosts at once and if a host goes down the VM is still up and running.

Hyper-V I'm sure has some great stuff in it as well but VMware is so far ahead of everyone its almost unfair. Cost-wise I'm sure Hyper-V will look much more enticing since it "comes" with Windows and can run on Windows Core as well but VMware does something similar with ESXi.

EDIT: Also if you're looking to learn about SQL Server and virtualizing, I highly encourage you to check out the PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter at http://virtualization.sqlpass.org