Hmmmmm......I am going to have to respectfully disagree with Doc-s. We started down the VMware

path 15 months ago and have not looked back. Going VM allowed us to consolidate the rack space for approx 35-40 hardware servers into about 22U in one rack.

We run 4 ESX servers with full redundancy ( if my terminology is bad, is because I'm the DBA, not the VM guy...), fail over, auto-switching to a new ESX box, etc. All the advantages of VM in an environment not from MS. We now have at least 40 servers on the VM environment and as hardware servers get to EOL warranty-wise, the databases are being migrated to VM.

Supported or not, VMware has served us well, especially in a production environment. The savings in hardware costs and environmental expense is not my responsibility, but just getting rid of 40 4U/6U servers has to be a savings of some magnitude. Talk about ease of maintaining the databases. In this day of personnel and budget cutbacks, VM can not be beat. We have even managed to free up rack space for the GeoData group to move back into the main computer room, which will allow that department to vacate an expensive rental site - more cost savings. Can't be beat.