>>We have moved to a virtual and hosted environment for some years now. Yes there is a lot to know and to configure, especially if things don't work (well).
>>One thing I learned the hard way: USE SDD disks as a basis. You'll regret it if you don't and are running multiple machines on a single physical machine. Get enough diskspace and ram. You can buy all the products that promise you to get better I/O or resource usage, but in the end the only true solution is to improve your hardware.

>Our VM solution I am looking at is fully expandable. As this is not dedicated hardware, I do not have any say on the disk infrastructure. One solution is providing a dedicated SAN Dell Equalogic.

That is really a shame. Because if there is one thing that might cause performance problems, then it would be disk I/O.

>Another is providing a virtual SAN access. Both can be expanded as desired. The same goes with the cores and the RAM on the VM host.

>We are going with no dependency on the hardware. Thus, we no longer want to purchase, install, maintain and upgrade the hardware. The same goes with the OS as in such environment, the ISP, providing the VM host, covers the OS licensing. SQL Server licensing is bound to the ISP SPLA and that is another good thing.

We still have virtualized the whole server, so no hardware dependency either, meaning we have multiple servers and workstations running on the physical machine. The ISP has installed the virtualized servers for us, they providing the licenses. Since we have an MSDN subscription we have installed the workstations under our license. We have full control on the configuration of the physical machine and the VMWare ESXI installation.

Walter