A system for virtualizing information technology (IT) appliances can include an IT appliance hosting facilities software. The IT appliance hosting facilities software can be implemented at a layer of abstraction above a virtual machine host, which is implemented in a layer of abstraction above a hardware layer of a computing system. The IT appliance hosting facilities software can include programmatic code functioning as virtualized hardware upon which a set of IT appliance software modules are able to concurrently run. The IT appliance hosting facilities software can provide caching, application level security, and a standardized framework for running the IT appliance software modules, which are configured in conformance with the standardized framework.