So here is my own comment - virtualisation, at least the sort we use (try to match with the form I filed minutes ago, heh) totaly fucks up clocks in virtual machines. This makes it unusable for production purposes. We depend on logs for production troubleshooting and timestamps must be accurate to tens of ms.

My company still runs NT4

But in my opinion it delivers not so much

We went 'virtual' about a year ago and am now in the process of moving the SQL servers and exchange back to physical.

Although we were unlucky with the servers we bought, the processors not supporting 64 bit OS based VMs, I am of the opinion now that they are not up to the task for critical applications or services unless the investment is considerably larger than it would be for a physical equivalent

its all fine these companies saying that virtualisation reduces cost, - yes in terms of hardware, but the more load you put onto a system the more power its going to consume and the risks of wear failure is greater.

Perhaps in large companies this may work, but for companies say less than 1000 users I don't think its viable.

With the best will in the world, having everything on one machine gives no redundancy, so then you buy 2 servers. Hmmmm, wasn't we trying to get away from that?

We have dabbled with Server 2008 / HyperV and felt that all it was, was virtual PC on drugs. not a platform for running multiple O/Ss on.

Jeez, imagine the I/O troughput to the hard drives - the heads would be constantly thrashing.