The demand to virtualize tier-1 applications such as Exchange continues to increase as organizations push towards virtualized environments to improve efficiency, reduce operational and capital costs, and improve the management of their IT infrastructure. Exchange virtualization seems to deliver another benefit, dual-level of resiliency , where the messaging environment is protected against failures by both Exchange and virtualization platform features, as we will soon explore. But can virtualization really help make Exchange deployments more resilient?

Virtualization has been a hot technology since around 2008, and many claims have been made regarding all the advantages that it brings. A typical one is that virtualization can help make IT infrastructures more resilient to failure. Virtualization has three characteristics that show potential for enhancing resilience: