Symantec offers disaster recovery for virtual machines

Symantec is collaborating with VMware to deliver enhanced high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) systems for virtualisation environments.

The two companies are co-operating through the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet) to integrate Symantec's Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) for VMware ESX with VMware Infrastructure to deliver complementary HA/DR systems, and add enhancements to VCS that enable HA/DR for VMware vCenter.

"Virtualisation 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.

TSANet aims to help meet customers' high availability support by co-ordinating vendor responses and enabling information exchange.

The new system takes an application-centric approach to HA/DR, allowing VCS to protect virtual environments from failures regardless of where or how they occur. Furthermore, because VCS is fully integrated with VMware vCenter, features such as VMware VMotion can help reduce planned downtime and the Distributed Resource Scheduler can help with active workload management.

"VMware is pleased to see Symantec deliver solutions like VCS for high availability that integrate with and complement the value of VMware virtualisation for customers and reinforce the importance of a strong partner ecosystem that helps differentiate VMware virtualisation," said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware.