Symantec is readying two new utilities that will help customers move mission critical applications to VMware’s virtualization platform.
The first offering, Application HA, is based on the company’s Veritas Cluster Server and offers mission critical services for mission critical applications, including monitoring and failure detection as well as the ability to restart failed applications. The solution also coordinates with VMware HA to restart virtual machines if necessary, the company said.
It offers support for Windows and Linux and a myriad of applications including Exchange IIS, Oracle and SAP, as well as VMware’s VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler.
ApplicationHA is expected to ship in September and will be priced at $350 per virtual machine. Here’s Symantec’s take on the product’s key value:
Customers have been aggressively virtualizing non-critical applications, and now that they are starting to move business critical applications like SAP and MS SQL Server databases to virtual platforms, they require high availability of the applications inside VMware virtual machines. Symantec ApplicationHA, for the first time, will ensure application high availability by providing visibility, control and integration with VMware vCenter Server and VMware High Availability (HA).
The second planned offering, Symantec VirtualStore, is a software networked attached storage system based on the company’s Veritas Storage Foundation technology and will provide key storage optimization services for the exploding number of virtual machines in the data center.
VirtualStore, which will ship sometime next quarter and be priced on an undisclosed per server basis, will scale servers and storage independently, provision virtual machines, and offer storage optimization for VMware platform.
FileSnap and Bootstorm are two interesting features. FileSnap, for example, allows users to rapidly clone and provision virtual machines via its integration with VMware vCenter Server. Bootstorm refers to the application’s ability to eliminate performance bottlenecks that occur when multiple users boot up VMs, Symantec explains.
Here’s Symantec’s take on the key value of VirtualStore:
- Help customers reduce storage costs associated with virtual machine sprawl and improve the performance of virtual infrastructures
- Enable administrators to dramatically reduce the cost per virtual machine by repurposing existing storage investments or using inexpensive or commodity storage
- Help IT organizations reduce their storage footprint by storing only the differences between the parent virtual machine image and each clone
- Significantly drive down total cost of ownership by taking advantage of the benefits of thin provisioning
It’s exciting to see such utilities coming to market and cooperation between Symantec and VMware on these products. It is true that many customers are still reluctant to move their mission critical applications to virtualized environments and are losing out on many benefits. Such utilities will also enable customers to more confidently move key applications to the cloud.
