I recently documented building a virtual server for use with the Team Foundation Server Dec 2005 CTP. It was a lot of fun / work - and it's documented at VSTeamSystemCentral.com.
An opportunity at work prompted use of another virtual server to facilitate a data-transformation-intense software migration. In order to make this particular migration work, I needed to install an old ODBC driver. I did not have access to the driver installation - apart from installing a suite of software products purchased back in the day. I needed to land the migrated data on an existing test server and I did not want to corrupt other software currently installed there.
So... I built a VPC, installed Windows and SQL Server 2k. I loaded the legacy software package, which installed the driver, then built some DTS packages to migrate the data from the source to my target server. Voila!
It's worked wonderfully. Among the many benefits is the low impact to our existing Development / Test environment.
This experience - coupled with clustering functionality built into Virtual Server 2005 R2 - has me seriously considering Production Virtual Servers. Thoughts?
:{> Andy