This document discusses virtualizing business critical applications. It begins by explaining why IT operations and application owners sometimes differ on virtualization, with the former wanting infrastructure efficiency and the latter concerned about performance and support. The document then shows trends of increasing virtualization for various workloads. It outlines operational benefits and new features in vSphere 5 that further reduce barriers to 100% virtualization. The rest of the document focuses on how virtualization can improve quality of service, availability, and time-to-market for applications through features like dynamic resource allocation, high availability, disaster recovery, and faster test/development cycles. It also addresses specific application information and licensing models. In the end it provides recommendations for getting started with virtualizing critical applications.