SQL Server Virtualization Summary

Support

• SQL Server is is supported on Microsoft Virtual Server, including the support for the clustered environment.
• With a Premier Support SQL Server is also supported for Novel virtual software.
• In 2007: VMWare is tested and supported by VMware, but not by Microsoft which is not a surprise considering it is in direct competition with their Virtual Server. If the customer has the premier support, Microsoft say it "will use commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues".
• March 2009 update: Microsoft started supporting SQL on some of the VM, including VMware. This excludes quest clustering and unsupported SQL/VM's OS combinations.
  

Licensing

Licensing for the SQL Server on virtual environment is done depending on the edition:

• For Enterprise Edition, if all processors in a machine have been licensed, then the customer may run unlimited instances of SQL server 2005 on an unlimited number of virtual operating environments on that same machine. Otherwise, the same as below
• For the other edition, it goes per each virtual environment and, within it, for each processor that the virtual machine accesses.

VMWare

Vmware has interesting features like: automatic failover to another VMware-enabled server, movingSQL Server instances from one host to another LIVE (zero downtime), quick disaster recovery.

Virtual Server

VS 2005 EE is a free download since April 2006. It supports up to 3.6G of RAM per each environment.

Virtual Server provides simple two-node failover from one virtual machine to another for testing and development

SQL 2005 EE has an add-on that can run Virtual Hard Disk for up to 10G. VHD is a disk for each virtual machine and it is stored in a .vhd file.