This is a good treatment of a complex subject in a short space. Thanks for putting this together!

It might be useful to compare VMware and Hyper-V from Microsoft, rather than the older 2K5 technology you mentioned. With Hyper-V from Microsoft, SQL Server is now supported, and Hyper-V is far superior to 2K5 in that respect.

Something that is important to keep in mind as well is that it is a bit more of a challenge to cluster SQL Server on any Hyper-V, and without that it is difficult to do rolling upgrades.

- Buck