We are migrating server from P2V but my server team is asking if we need an virtual server with physical storage drives.
What's the benefit of having a virtual server and physical drive for SQL Server?
Never heard of this setup
It's a broad topic but I'll try and shed some light on the subject. For SQL, in general, the bottleneck that we always fight with is disk contention. How to read and write faster, that's what a database is for right? :)
I suspect what they are offering you is a virtual server that uses drives on a physical SAN with dedicated drives. Ideally that is what you want. You could then have the drives configured into a RAID10 or other high performance/highly redudant way without the chance of somebody else impacting your environment.
When working with SQL it's very hard to track down "Why is this slow" and if the slowness is being causes by disk contention, it can be that much harder with shared drives and especially virtual drives. perf mon can be very helpful but then when you discover it is a disk problem but you are on virtual drives there may not be much you can do about it. Simply increasing the partition size won't help.
If you have your data on a dedicated physical drives on a SAN where you can expand and add, you'll have options. And if you can get physical SSD drives, do it!
There are some other posts similar to this, for your reading enjoyment: https://serverfault.com/questions/190374/vmware-workstation-virtual-vs-physical-disk