VMware partners with Symantec on ApplicationHA

Enforce VMware HA with Symantec's ApplicationHA.

Symantec is about to release (in September) new product called ApplicationHA. What's that? It is based on the Veritas Cluster Server technology and provides application availability in coordination with VMware HA. As you know the VMware HA help to restart your VM on another server, but what about the application which is running inside of that VM? This application is not crash consistent so in up to 30% of the cases you can loose some data.

The Symantec's solution monitors the application running inside of your critical VM and if failure is detected, the application is restarted.

To fully protect the whole VM you can use Fault Tolerance (FT). Sure. But it mean an investment into a vSphere Advanced licensing model, but what if you're having just Essentials or Essentials Plus? This could be an interresting alternative. Symantec ApplicationHA is scheduled to be available worldwide in Sept. 2010 with a list price of $350 USD per virtual machine.

Some details:

• Monitors applications’ health status and detects failures in the virtual machine.
• Restarts failed applications, it restarts the VM if needed.
• Recovery coordinated with VMware HA.
• Failure detection and recovery of applications inside virtual machines.
• Out-of-the-box support for a wide range of enterprise applications such as SQL, Exchange, Oracle, SAP, etc.
• Heterogeneous guest OS support including Windows and Linux.
• Discovery and auto-configuration.
• Integration with VMware vCenter to provide visibility of the application status though vCenter.
• Compatible with VMware vMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

VirtualStore Release.

There will be another product available for vSphere from the Symantec's side called VirtualStore. As you might suppose, it's some kind of virtual storage based on on Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation. The solutions fully integrates into vCenter and supports Thin provisioning.

• Scalable, clustered NAS solution with advanced storage optimization technology.
• Page cache optimization with FileSnap technology.

Symantec VirtualStore creates space optimized clones of virtual machines along with patented cache optimization to pack more virtual machines into a single NAS head. By providing an integrated solution that combines the capabilities and performance of VirtualStore with the industry leading virtualization solutions from VMware, IT administrators can deliver advanced storage management capabilities over NFS while increasing business agility and driving down the total cost of ownership.

See a Powerpoint presentation here:

Source: Symantec