The concept of high availability is a long winded discussion that must be clearly defined by starting with the businesses tolerance for service downtime. Once the business objectives have been determined technologists can reverse engineer the design of the virtual environment to allow for the minimum downtime and availability standards that must be achieved. Another great challenge that must be over come by you I.T. solution/provider is the procurement of a best of breed technology hardware and software platform that can successfully coexist to meet the performance and availability standards and not sacrifice the inherent technology capabilities and recommended configuration.
All too often businesses underestimate the value of selecting a specialized technologist to help with the key critical configuration steps necessary for this high availability virtualized infrastructure. Another key component to ensure a successful implementation is documentation and testing of the redundancy and availability of the solution.