In the past, business continuity was the first driver of virtualization; virtualization not only helps with server consolidation and driving down costs across IT organizations, but can also improve availability, resilience, and recoverability for business-critical applications and services.

VMware provides a holistic approach to protecting your IT environment and all applications running on the vSphere platform from a variety of factors that can cause application downtime, including unplanned events such as server failures and even planned events such as server maintenance. These solutions provide simple, cost-effective protection with a standard solution for all your applications and services.

VMware BC-related solutions cover the following:

• Local availability: Some products and technologies protect applications against the downtime of individual hosts. This includes vSphere HA and FT for unplanned downtime, as well as vMotion and storage vMotion for planned downtime. 

• Data protection: There are solutions to back up entire VMs, including OSes, application binaries, and application data, in a simple non-disruptive manner. A third-party solution can use VMware storage APIs for data protection to enable native VM backup.
• Disaster recovery: vSphere Replication is an exciting addition to the vSphere platform, providing a cost-efficient and straightforward way to implement VM-based replication. For DR orchestration, vCenter SRM leverages vSphere and vSphere Replication (or storage-based replication) to protect applications against site failures and to streamline planned migrations.
• Disaster avoidance: vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) is a configuration option, introduced in vSphere 5, that allows the use of stretched clusters.

You can find more details in Mastering Disaster Recovery: Business Continuity and Virtualization Best Practices at http://download3.vmware.com/elq/img/EMEA/EMEA11122/pdf/VirtMngt_MasteringDisasterRecovery_WhitePaper_Q410_EN.pdf?cid=70180000000wCtz.