Symantec Corp. has introduced the latest version of Symantec ApplicationHA, Symantec's high availability solution for VMware virtual environments that supports customers' ability to virtualize their business-critical applications. The solution was first introduced in September 2010, and was co-developed by Symantec and VMware.
Symantec ApplicationHA, based on Veritas Cluster Server technology, provides high availability for applications through application-level visibility, control, and recovery in VMware environments. ApplicationHA runs inside a VMware guest operating system and integrates with VMware High Availability. In the event of an application failure, ApplicationHA coordinates recovery and restarts the application or virtual machine.
The new version of Symantec ApplicationHA extends the solution's application awareness to disaster recovery through integration with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Now, with the new release of ApplicationHA, in the event that VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager fails over the virtual machine from the primary site to the disaster recovery site, Symantec ApplicationHA continues to monitor the health of applications after recovery and re-establishes communication with VMware High Availability. Additionally, ApplicationHA ensures that the application components come online in the right sequence during testing and actual disaster recovery scenarios, and application status is recorded in the compliance report during SRM's test or actual disaster recovery.
New reporting and management functions have also been added to the product to enable IT professionals to centrally monitor hundreds of applications within virtual machines from a single dashboard. ApplicationHA now provides a summary list of virtual machines, an inventory of applications inside them and the status of each application.
In creating Symantec ApplicationHA, VMware and Symantec sought to address data center administrators' desire to virtualize more of their business critical applications and the accompanying concerns. As customers move from virtualizing peripheral applications to more core mission-critical apps, virtualization adoption declines, Don Angspatt, vice president of product management for Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "As folks get to their more mission-critical applications, they are more cautious and more risk-averse. No one wants to stake their career on whether SQL, Oracle, SAP, and Exchange can be running all the time and be up all the time in a virtualized environment."
The top challenge in managing virtualized servers is application awareness and availability, Angspatt emphasizes. To ensure high availability of a service that IT delivers, it is necessary to ensure that both the VM is running and the application is running, and if the VM has been recovered, to ensure that the application has been recovered or restarted, he explains. "Those two things don't always go hand-in-hand, and is the pain point that ApplicationHA seeks to solve."
Symantec ApplicationHA 5.1 SP2 supports Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise. For complete details, go to www.symantec.com/business/application-ha.