
This white paper provides an overview of the challenges that organizations face in virtualizing business critical applications given their current tools and processes. Specifically, it focuses on the high availability requirements of these applications and the difficulty and compromises organizations have to make due to lack of an effective solution. The paper introduces a new joint solution from
Symantec and
VMware called
ApplicationHA that addresses the challenges without forcing organizations to make difficult trade-offs between fully protecting business-critical applications, exploiting virtualization capabilities, and minimizing operational cost and complexity.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp4-virtualize-biz-critical-apps.pdf
Symantec ApplicationHA provides monitoring capabilities for applications running inside virtual machines hosted on ESX or ESXi hosts managed by aVMwarevCenter Server. Symantec ApplicationHA adds a layer of application awareness to the core High Availability functionality offered by VMware virtualization technology.
Symantec ApplicationHA is based on Veritas™Cluster Server (VCS) and internally uses similar concepts such as agents, resources, and service groups. However, it does not include the high availability cluster components such as the Global Atomic Broadcast (GAB) and Low Latency Transport (LLT). Symantec ApplicationHA has a lightweight server footprint that allows faster installation and configuration. Key benefits include:
■ Out of box integration with VMwareHA and VMware vCenter Server
■ Full visibility and control over applications with the ability to start, stop, and monitor applications running inside virtual machines
■ Standardized way to manage applications using a single interface that is integrated with VMware vSphere Client
■ Specialized Application Maintenance mode, in which ApplicationHA allows you to intentionally take an application out of its purview for maintenance or troubleshooting