Hmm the server sprawl you describe would indicate that there aren't any change management policies or capacity management reviews in place.

I'm a big fan of virtualisation but your vendors and customers were right to be sceptical. Not every server is a suitable virtualisation candidate, some servers just shouldn't be virtualised, storage I\O is your biggest headache.

As an example, in a previous contract the organisation virtualised everything (and I do mean everything). We had a new SQL server deployment for a GIS mapping system producing maps of the county (one of the largest in the UK). AAfter working with the vendors and internal teams we decided this server had to be physical to provide the performance this system required. If you're going to provide resources to a VM that consume most of the host, it probably shouldn't be a VM 😉

In my current contract we were asked to use snap manager. We soon pushed back on this as it's ok for storage replication but not very suitable for fast single database restores. We now use Litespeed for day to day backups and scripting to DR. You need to provide a strong business case and stick to your guns.