As today’s organizations contend with skyrocketing capacity requirements, they are increasingly focused on scalability. As a result, virtualization – once considered a touchy subject – has become commonplace in IT management. In fact, nearly 50 percent of IT deployments are expected to be on virtual machines in 2012, which translates to roughly 58 million virtual machine deployments worldwide.

For most businesses, virtualization still means virtual operating systems running on a hypervisor, and the most popular hypervisor is still VMware. Microsoft SQL Server is the fastest growing database platform in the virtualization space and that market is growing at nearly 40 percent year over year.In fact, 47 percent of the virtual machine deployments in 2010 included database software.

So why do companies choose VMware and how does this affect SQL Server and those responsible for managing virtualized SQL Server environments? Read on to find answers to these questions.