It's not that virtualizing is a bad idea or that people on the forum don't support it. 🙂 The post is indeed long and the questions are probably something that should be discussed in greater detail, maybe as a project with a consultant.

Ultimately the determination to move to virtual is something that should be tested. I'm sure that you can find plenty of success stories as well as failures. The key is understanding what your environment requirements are and can you meet them with a virtual server.

A couple of questions I would have are;

1. Are you looking to do a like for like as far as the resources on the Virtual server?

2. How is your IO performance presently? What are your read and write performance counters showing?

3. How is your memory utilization presently? Is you Page Life Expectancy solid?

4. Do you have people experienced using virtualization so that if you run into performance issues you are going to have support for troubleshooting, tuning, etc?

5. Is is possible to set up a side-by-side install to production and run a test copy of the application against it to see how it performs?

Really, based on what you are describing it doesn't sound like your environment should be a challenge to virtualization. My main concern would be at the disk / IO layer. However, the move should not be taken lightly and the cost savings are not always as dramatic as people make them out to be.

I'm not sure if that helps or not. I will say in closing that I have kicked against it on a couple of occasions as the performance was causing problems but I have also now seen those issues worked through and a very solid SQL Server environment put up that runs very well.

If you have specific questions I can try to answer with experience that I have but it is not deep for sure.