We have a client that wants to migrate a physical cluster to VMware (5.5). At  high level what they would like to do is to add VMs to the cluster, add the SQL Server Failover Cluster instances to the VMs (mixed physical/virtual) and then failover the instances to the VMs. 

Will this work? Has anyone done it?

We have talked to them about VMware HA but they rejected that option.

thanks

I would be curious to know the same..

I think it should work. basically to the existing cluster ..you are going to add the new virtual server as nodes and then, install as SQL as adding another node to the existing sql cluster and failover the instances and then do the removal sql removal from the existing physical server and then remove them from the cluster...

sounds like something that can be done..I would be curious to know the pitfalls .. I am not sure how you will handle the licensing..

Yes. it works. i have done this.

if you want to convert physical to virtual you can do in two ways.

one way is migrate every thing.

secondary way if you have cluster add a vm node to the cluster and fail over to virtual and decommission the physical node.