SteelEye Aims to Protect VMware Infrastructure 3

SteelEye Technology recently announced their latest product designed to increase the availability and data protection of virtual machines in a VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) environment. The product is called SteelEye Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure 3, and the company describes it as breakthrough technology which supports clustering together physical and virtual servers for high availability, continuous data protection and disaster recovery.

SteelEye Protection Suite is said to complement the high availability technologies that are already built into VI3 (VMware HA and VMware Consolidated Backup) by delivering advanced data replication and high availability clustering technologies to monitor and automatically recover any piece of the VI3 environment.

For example, while VMware HA protects virtual machines from hardware failures, SteelEye LifeKeeper provides protection against operating system and application failures within the virtual machines. The software can run within either a Linux or Windows guest operating system, and according to the company, LifeKeeper monitors applications and all of their dependencies including file systems, device drivers, IP addresses and data connections to ensure that any failure is automatically detected and recovered.

Recovery can include restarting the application within the same virtual machine, migrating the application to a virtual machine on the same server, migrating it to a virtual machine on a different server or performing failover to a physical server.

The company said that unlike other solutions on the market which provide for migration of virtual machines or monitoring of a small set of potential failure conditions, LikeKeeper monitors the entire virtual machine environment and can perform both administrator initiated stop and resume of ESX Server virtual machines and fully automated LifeKeeper initiated recovery, based on user-defined policies, to a paired physical server.

The Protection Suite also delivers what the company calls the first solution for clustering VirtualCenter Management Server. Being able to detect problems within VirtualCenter and then automatically recovering from them is key to avoiding any disruption in VI3 management capabilities.

“As companies migrate business-critical applications from physical environments into virtual environments (P to V) to take advantage of server consolidation, ensuring the availability of applications residing within those virtual servers is critical,” said Jean S. Bozman, Vice President in IDC’s Enterprise Computing group.

“With its support for VMware Virtual Infrastructure virtualized environments, SteelEye’s extension of these clustering capabilities into virtual environment protection is a logical next step that preserves a common model for protecting applications in both the P and V environments.”