(Yeah, almost a zombie topic, but I just found it...)

:Whistling:

Having done some work with MS Hyper-V Server, I'm going to chime in on this. I think what patrickmcginnis59 is thinking of is called "Pass-Through disk" in Hyper-V. Basically, the VM "virtual" disk is actually a physical disk (or a LUN on a SAN somewhere,) and will generally have the benefits of living on a physical disk. BUT (at least with Hyper-V, and especially in a Hyper-V cluster) this introduces problems with backing up the VM. Also, there was a blog posting by someone from MS a while back comparing the performance of a Pass-Through disk vs a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD,) which found the performance differences were slight.

Now, as for pharrells' question, I can see a couple possible reasons for doing it the way the previous guy did:

1. That's the way we do it with physical servers, that's the way we're going to do it with virtual servers! :hehe:

2. Depending on the backup solution, there may be a backup that is only backing up the data file and log file VHDs. Thus, if the physical server failed, you could deploy a new VM (with SQL installed,) restore and attach the two VHDs, do some cleanup, and go. If you're backing up all 4 VHDs, then you can even move the VM to a new physical server, restore your SQL backups to "catch up" and go.

Performance-wise, in a virtual environment I don't think this setup would give much performance boost.

That's my 2c...

Jason