With the increase in resources limits in Hyper-V on Windows Server 8, I have been toying with the idea of putting every server on a Hyper-V instance.  Even if it is just a stand alone instance with one Hyper-V instance on a single physical server.

By having every server be a virtual server, I will have much greater flexibility in moving the server to new hardware for growth or disaster recovery reasons.  The virtual server would be like a little server package that I pick up and move anywhere.  I could then use virtualization replication to move to a new server with very little downtime or create a warm standby server.

I do recognize that the virtualization platform itself would add overhead and take resources away from the SQL Server.  However, I think the trade-off in increased manageability is worth it.  It won’t of course work for every database server, but for the most part my SQL Servers are modest in size and rarely need more than 128 GB of RAM.  I do spend a ridiculous amount of time moving between servers, so the time savings is worth it alone.

What are your thoughts?