Symantec looks to provide HA and DR for VMware

Enterprise organizations that use VMware virtualization and Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) high-availability software will be glad to know that Symantec recently announced a collaboration effort under way between the two companies to deliver enhanced high-availability (HA) and disaster-recovery (DR) solutions for VMware environments. The collaboration also includes a version of VCS that provides protection for VMware’s vCenter management product.

Symantec and VMware are also participating in a recently introduced program called the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet). The TSANet support initiative will deliver highly trained support expertise to solve customers’ high-availability needs. Through the program, mutual customers will benefit from an improved support experience thanks to coordinated responses, information exchange, and reduced response times.

“Virtualization increases the need for HA/DR solutions that protect the availability of mission-critical applications,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server Group. “We are excited to work with VMware to deliver an HA/DR platform for unplanned downtime that complements existing VMware technology such as VMotion for planned downtime, ensuring complete application availability. Symantec and VMware will provide organizations with integrated availability solutions and support to ensure their applications are fully protected at all times.”

Symantec’s VCS is designed to protect mission-critical applications from unplanned downtime through local failover of virtual machines, or failover between clusters in a remote location. The Symantec solution makes use of VMware’s VMotion technology and its Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for active workload management.

In addition to protecting applications from unplanned downtime, VCS also protects VMware vCenter from unplanned downtime. According to a recent Symantec study, one in four respondents said that protecting VMware vCenter was one of the top two challenges in making their virtual environments highly available. Symantec listened. vCenter is a critical component of VMware environments since it usually acts as the source of providing virtual machine provisioning, performance monitoring, utilization control, and live migration for most organizations.

While providing this type of technology is obviously important, Symantec isn’t the first vendor to cluster VMware vCenter. Others include SteelEye Technology and the Neverfail Group.