High Availability for Apps within Virtual Servers

In a review of VMworld announcements titled VMware dispels virtualization myths (sort of) , Bridget Botelho writes

Speaking at VMworld 2007, which took place Sept, 11-13 in San Francisco, VMware Inc. Product Marketing Manager Mark Chuang and Marketing Manager Steven Gross led a session titled "Dispelling Virtualization Myths," which tackled issues such as virtualization's readiness for production systems, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing policies and security.

Included withint the article is a quote from Chris Wolf of analyst firm, Burton Group:

from a reliability standpoint, running applications on a VM may be even more secure than running them on a dedicated physical machine. Applications that do not natively support clustering can fail over to another server as part of a virtual machine via VMware HA, and adding replication software such as that offered by SteelEyeTechnology Inc. makes the process even easier, since it can trigger failover based on application failures, Burton said.

The combination of application-level monitoring and server virtualization technology is very powerful.  Users realize all of the benefits of server consolidation, greater utilization computing resources and unique configurations only available in a virtualized environment (such 2 copies of Exchange server on the same box or a mixed Linux/Windows single server config) without sacrificing any availability for their apps and data.