I would have to answer yes and no. It depends on what was purchased when VMWare was setup. I am not a VMWare guy but we use it here and we have in place software that can role a virtual machine to another virtual machine in very little time. so lets say the physical server goes down, with in a couple seconds the VM at the backup site would come on line. Becuase our VM environment is already clustered I would think that doing the same with SQL would deffinetly be overkill and could even cause problems. I could also see the advantage if you do not cluster your vm environment. so I think the first question to ask is what is the failover plan for the VM?