I would be very interested to know what you think about running a production site on VMWare.
Web and SQL and EMail etc. We are due to update our current server vintage 2001 4Gig RAM.

The two things that concern me is SQL performance, and if we also move our main city site to DNN, the traffic will be crazy.

It currently has a google page rank of 8 and I wouldn't want a VMWare approach to adversely affect the user experience.

VMWare is nothing more that an effecient way to partition hardware. It allows you to get the most out a a server, which in most cases barely uses more that 10% of it CPU capability.

As for your current configuration, without knowing specifics, you can partition a 4-way or 8-way box so that high demand apps (SQL, Exchange) take the lion-share of the CPU's and memory, as IIS is not that demanding.

In my experience has been very positive using virtualization, which began with a need (rack-space was a little tight). Since that time as boxes are cycled out, we looked a machines with more beef and dual task them. There is an adminstration learning curve, but well worth it.

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