1. A computer apparatus comprising: at least one processor; a memory coupled to the at least one processor; an application server program in the memory comprising: a high availability (HA) policy engine that prompts a computer administrator to define and store a number of general HA policies in a policy table, where the HA policies are in the form of rules with conditions for automatically setting HA policies for a plurality of applications when an application of the plurality of applications is later installed; an application inspection unit that parses the application to be installed to determine if the one application can use HA features; an HA runtime engine that installs and configures the application for HA features based on the application's ability to use HA features and the HA policies in the policy table; wherein the application inspection unit parses the application to determine if the application can benefit from HA functionality on API boundaries and metafiles; and wherein the application inspection unit creates a mapping list of potential HA functionality that is compared to the policy table by the HA runtime engine.