Think virtualizing SQL Server is evil? Here's a 94 page PDF from the SQL Server team that might have you thinking otherwise... "Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012"

Taylor Brown's Blog - New White Paper - Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012

I wanted to let everyone know the SQL Server team has just published a shiny new white paper (96 pages long) that discusses all the best practices for managing SQL Server on virtual machines in Windows Server 2012...  It's a very well done white paper and definitely worth reading.

Here's a link to it: Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012

Snip from the PDF:

Introduction
This guide provides high-level best practices and considerations for deploying and managing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on a Microsoft virtualization infrastructure. The recommendations and guidance in this document aim to:
 Complement the architectural design of an organization’s specific environment.
 Help organizations take advantage of the key platform features in SQL Server 2012 to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability.

Executive Summary
With the proliferation of applications in everyday use, enterprises have an increasing need for more instances of databases such as SQL Server. Most applications have their own set of database requirements, leading to the use of multiple versions of databases and to significant costs related to the databases and related hardware resources. More importantly, the hardware deployed for databases is not fully utilized or there is a demand to scale up hardware resources to meet peak utilization on certain databases. Therefore, it has become important to control the cost of databases and related hardware resources, and to optimize and scale the use of hardware resources in different scenarios to provide better flexibility and maintain service level agreements (SLAs). An ideal solution to this problem is virtualization.

Virtualization is fairly common now. Many organizations worldwide have moved beyond the nascent stage into being more advanced users of server virtualization, specifically. These organizations have gained benefits in the areas of costs, efficiency, operations, availability, agility, and resiliency.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 provide a host of new features that can be used to effectively virtualize demanding database workloads that previously were not considered for virtualization. This guide explains these new features in the context of how organizations should consider virtualizing SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 and the benefits of managing this virtualized environment with Microsoft System Center 2012. Working together, these industry-leading products deliver an integrated platform with a low total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as mission-critical scale, performance, and availability. The platform also provides enhanced end-to-end security, management, and monitoring capabilities.

Further, many organizations now want to go a step beyond and adopt an IT infrastructure that is optimized for and ready to work in the cloud. They need an IT infrastructure that can seamlessly span from a private to a public cloud. To achieve this goal, organizations require a common virtualization platform that can increase performance and efficiency across the infrastructure. In this regard, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V offers an ideal virtualization platform for SQL Server 2012.

Target Audience
This guide is intended for IT professionals and technical decision makers (TDMs), including IT consultants, architects, database administrators, and IT managers. They can use this guide to understand how to set up an environment for virtualizing SQL Server 2012 using an integrated virtualization platform built on some of the latest Microsoft technologies, such as Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012. Understanding key considerations and best practices can help TDMs effectively plan and deploy SQL Server 2012 virtualization using Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This guide serves the following purposes for these key roles:
 Architects: Understand how the entire virtualization environment will work as they design the architecture.
 IT Managers: Design processes to fit the overall virtualization environment so that costs are reduced and efficiency is increased as much as possible.
 Database Administrators: Understand how SQL Server 2012 can be set up and function in the virtual environment.

Finally snaps of the ToC: