I think that I am sort of unusual, in that I am one of the rare ones who actually started as an Enterprise DBA on Oracle and DB2 and part...

That is true, but it's never been my decision.

Which Virtual platform to use, i.e. Microsoft or VMWare, supported or not, has always been the pervue of the Windows Administration...

I'm not a Windows Administrator, so I don't know all of the details or pitfalls related to making VM stable. I do know that we have very little problem with...

That's a bit of a generalization, and not really accurate anymore. Virtualization has improved considerably recently, and many production databases perform quite well on a virtual machine.

So the answer...