I hear that high I/O Exchange or SQL servers are not good candidates for virtualization. Is this true?
No, not necessarily. They can be candidates, but in today's world they often aren't because the focus is on consolidation and high consolidation ratios (everyone wants that ROI right now).
High I/O applications tend to use most of their hardware, therefore you are paying for a hypervisor and not getting a 4:1 virtual machine-to-processor consolidation ratio. You may be getting a 5:1. Needless to say, not quite appealing from a finance perspective, but it doesn't mean they can't be virtualized.
This was first published in August 2007