Lorenzo DBA (5/26/2011)
I would agree that Virtualization is the answer and is cost effective for both the hardware and licensing perspective. If you licence the by ESX host instead of the VM's, it is cheaper. We have a (3) node cluster composed of (3) VM servers. Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit Enterprise with SQL Server 2008 R2 64 bit Enterprise. It runs perfectly and we use it for UAT Testing. Virtualization also offers an added HA layer as well as having SAN snapshots taken of each volume. We are very happy with the Clustered Virutal Machines we have.
if you need it only for testing and don't care about some management features there is a free version of ESXi server you can download. i was running it until a few days ago when i switched to hyper-v