Virtualization can enable enterprise IT organizations to easily create new virtual systems in minutes, but such systems should still be deployed in a controlled and manageable manner, similar to how physical systems are deployed. The Dell Scalable Enterprise Technology Center used a farm of servers running VMware ESX Server software to manage a deployment of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 virtual machines (VMs). This article provides an introduction to current virtualization products and SQL Server 2005, and examines techniques for managing SQL Server 2005 in a virtualized environment. It also includes best practices for managing a virtualized server farm, example usage scenarios for virtualization and SQL Server 2005, and basic performance results from testing SQL Server 2005 in a virtualized environment.