Hope you are well. I have worked on a few systems where Virtualisation has
been the way to go. Over the past week I have actually just completed a Physical
to Virtual migration using VMWare and all has gone well with a couple of little
things to change. I also have a completed building a new Virtual System
comprised of Active Directory, Exchange, Mulitple SharePoint Farms and WSS Farms
as well as Firewalls etc.

I always like to test everything within the Virtual Environement first, it is
safe and faily easy to do. Highly recommend building the Virtual Environment by
using the P2V application from VMware, it saves you a lot of time.

Just to clarify: So you took an actual physical farm implementation and
virtualized a "copy" of it offline leaving the production farm
unaffected?

yes I did. It meant I didn't have build all the VM's and then backup sharepoint
and then restore after I built a "like for like" system. Took about an hour per
server but all worked and simply gave them different IP Addresses and changed
the DNS headers. Works a treat.

We've done something similiar, but in our dev environment. We have the
servers configured the same as our production servers, and we just restore
the various sites depending on which application/server we are developing
for.

We ended up having 10 different VM's and in our team you just take a VM
that's not being used and work on that one. We have scripts to restore
environments, and each night the machines are recycled, so we know they are
clean and consistent.