Here in steamy Orlando at Microsoft's TechEd IT Pros geekfest, Double-Take Software and Neverfail both announced that they'll be supporting MS's upcoming Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor.Neverfail made the rather predictable announcement that you can run its Continuous Availability Suite products on Hyper-V guests as well as physical servers. Double-Take made the more interesting announcement that its replication engine will run on the host Windows system and replicate the data for some or all of the guests on that host, allowing a system administrator to protect multiple virtual servers with a single instance of Double-Take or GeoCluster, its solution for servers using Microsoft clustering technology for failover.

Running host-based replication and fail-over on the hypervisor reduces the management overhead of having to individually throttle and manage a replication connection for each server that's running a mission-critical application. Instead, you can have one replication connection support all the applications on guests from a single virtual server host.

Add in Double-Take's Virtual Recovery Assistant, which replicates and then migrates physical to virtual machines, and Double-Take is in a good position to support the Microsoft loyalists here at TechEd as they move into a virtual world.