Well this “SQL Server Support Policy for Failover Clustering and Virtualization gets an update…” has made my day! Microsoft now officially supports running SQL Server in a virtual machine environment. The minor gotcha (which I think is frankly fair) is that is has to run on Windows 2008.

# Guest Failover Clustering is supported for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 in a virtual machine for Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, and SVVP certified configurations provided both of the following requirements are met:

* The Operating System running in the virtual machine (the “Guest Operating System”) is Windows Server 2008 or higher
* The virtualization environment meets the requirements of Windows 2008 Failover Clustering as documented at The Microsoft Support Policy for Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters.

Guest Failover Clustering is when you create a SQL Server failover cluster inside a virtual machine where the nodes are running as a virtual machine. A non-SVVP configuration that meets these requirements will receive support from Microsoft CSS per the policies documented in

897615 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/) Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software

Very cool, the Data Center guys are going to love this one!

Gareth