Currently we are working on setting up environments for a large-scale project.

For the Windows environment, we are setting up HP Blade environment with few blades and VMWare server on top. HP Blades setup one cool setup with iLO (integrated Lights Out) capability allowing us to manage the entire enclosure and all the devices within the enclosure through single interface.

One of the components in our environment is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0). We are planning to virtualize this along with the backend SQL Server 2005. So, we are talking about setting up SQL Server cluster on VMWare running on Blades and then using the same for a virtualized WSS setup. This is going to be very interesting. While searching the web for information on best practices for performance on virtualization, I came across this very nice document by Viral Tarapara.
 

SharePoint Virtualization Best Practices

Enjoy.

I do have doubts on using virtualized environments for SQL Server cluster. However, few documents on the net show that it is feasible and workable solution.  

More on our experience with this setup later…

Hiren