Virtualizing Business Applications

Very fine article. The move toward virtualizing not only business applications, but business-critical and mission-critical applications is under way. By virtue of the nature of our business (fault tolerant servers) we see the early adopters, which include organizations managing funds transfers, electronic payments processing, electronic healthcare records, and life-safety services. These companies and agencies give equal consideration to both the underlying infrastructure and the virtualization software to achieve the levels availability these applications require. Thinking that robust software on commodity servers -- clustered or otherwise -- can do the job is a high-risk strategy.