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Symantec Helps Companies Deploy, Monitor And Manage Virtualized Applications With ApplicationHA

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Symantec has announced the latest version of ApplicationHA, its high availability solution for VMware virtual environments that provides customers the ability to confidently virtualize their business critical applications.

The latest version of Symantec ApplicationHA extends the existing capabilities for disaster recovery with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager integration and provides a dashboard to monitor and manage hundreds of applications within VMware vCenter Server.

Symantec ApplicationHA, based on the industry-leading Veritas Cluster Server technology, provides high availability for business-critical applications through application-level visibility, control, and recovery in VMware environments. ApplicationHA runs inside a VMware guest operating system and fully integrates with VMware High Availability. In the event of an application failure, ApplicationHA coordinates recovery and restarts the application and/or virtual machine.

With this release, Symantec provides an application-aware Disaster Recovery solution through integration with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. 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 the 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. Finally, application status is recorded in the compliance report during SRM’s test or actual disaster recovery.

ApplicationHA now features new reporting and management functionality that allows IT professionals to centrally monitor hundreds of applications within virtual machines from a single dashboard.

By centrally managing and monitoring all applications within virtual environments, organizations can have better visibility into the health and needs of such applications. ApplicationHA now provides a summary list of virtual machines, an inventory of applications inside them and the status of each application.

ApplicationHA is now also easier to install. Installation previously required leveraging the product installer. ApplicationHA now enables a push install directly from the VMware vSphere client. This allows the user to simply install the VMware vCenter Server plugin and do everything else — from install, configuration, and on-going management of ApplicationHA directly from the VMware vSphere client.

These enhancements enable the installation experience to be similar between Linux and Windows guest OSs.

Symantec ApplicationHA 5.1 SP2 has a list price of $350 USD per virtual machine.

Symantec ApplicationHA supports major platforms including Windows, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and SuSE Linux Enterprise.

New Challenges Emerge As Virtualization Goes Mainstream, Symantec Finds

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Symantec recently announced the findings of its 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey which examined how organizations plan to move business-critical initiatives to virtual and hybrid cloud computing environments.

The survey highlighted topics including server, client, and storage virtualization, storage-as-a-service, and hybrid/private cloud technologies; and the results uncover disparities between expectations and reality as enterprises deploy these solutions. The survey is based on more than 3,700 respondents from 35 countries worldwide.

Adoption of server virtualization is widespread, and more than 75 percent of organizations are discussing private and hybrid cloud deployments. Of the technologies evaluated in the survey, server and storage virtualization are the most mature with 45 and 43 percent of enterprises implementing. Private Storage-as-a-Service is the least mature with 36 percent adopting.

Early investments have revealed gaps between expectations and reality which indicate that organizations are still learning what these technologies are capable of and how to overcome the new challenges they bring with them.

Server virtualization projects were most successful, with only a 4 percent average gap between expected and realized goals. The biggest gaps occurred in scalability, reducing capital expenditures and reducing operating expenditures.

The average shortfall in storage virtualization was 33 percent, with disappointments coming in agility, scalability and reducing operating expenditures.

Respondents reported an average gap between expected and realized goals of 26 percent with endpoint/desktop virtualization. They cited disappointments in new endpoint deployment, application delivery and application compatibility.

Seventy-seven percent of organizations are considering private Storage-as-a-Service, but these projects are challenging to implement and fall short of expectations by 37 percent. For example, complexity reduction was a goal for 84 percent of respondents, but reached by only 44 percent.

The survey shows that organizations are leveraging virtualization for business-critical applications. Of enterprises who are implementing virtualization, more than half (59 percent) plan to virtualize database applications in the next 12 months.

Fifty-five percent plan to virtualize web applications, and 47 percent plan to virtualize email and calendar applications. Forty-one percent plan to virtualize ERP applications.

More than half of respondents (56 percent) said storage costs somewhat or significantly increased with server virtualization. Of those in the process of virtualizing storage, the top three reasons for deployment include reducing operating expenses (55 percent), improving storage performance (54 percent), and improving disaster recovery readiness (53 percent).

Seventy-six percent of enterprises who have implemented server virtualization indicated that security was a somewhat/extremely large factor in keeping various constituents from being more confident about placing business-critical applications on virtualized servers. Sixty-three percent listed security as a significant/extreme challenge to implementing server virtualization.

Now Avaiable: Symantec Workspace Virtualization 6.3 64-bit Customer Preview

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Symantec has announced the 64-bit customer preview for its Symantec Workspace Virtualization 6.3 product – an application virtualization platform that has its roots going back to the Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) days.

The following are new features in this 6.3 release:

  • Support for Windows 7 and Vista 64-bit editions – This release provides 64-bit support for the latest Microsoft desktop operating systems. Stream virtualized applications instead of reinstalling as you roll out Windows 7.
  • Automatic Application Streaming by File Extension – Provisioned applications are streamed automatically when associated files are opened on the system. For example, if Microsoft Word is provisioned but not streamed, the application is streamed automatically when a doc file is opened.
  • Microsoft Office 2010 support – This release provides better support for packaging, streaming, and virtualizing Microsoft Office 2010. See the packaging guidelines later in this document.

These are new features that audience members at Symantec Vision earlier this year said they were waiting on.  Symantec promised, and now that promise is close at hand.

Become part of the Preview experience, sign up for your Symantec Beta account now.

Release: Symantec NetBackup 7

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Symantec has announced NetBackup 7 to help enterprise-level organizations protect, store and recover information with greater efficiency and reliability through a single, unified platform.

The latest release of NetBackup enables organizations to simplify information management while reducing data stores and network traffic by integrating deduplication everywhere — at the client, media server and on third party hardware appliances — thus reducing overall costs. NetBackup also delivers complete virtual machine protection to increase backup and recovery speeds of data within virtual environments and adds new backup replication for fast, cost-effective disaster recovery.

With NetBackup 7, Symantec delivers on its data deduplication everywhere strategy to help organizations reduce overall storage consumption in physical and virtual environments by adding data deduplication technology into the backup client and at the media server. By integrating deduplication closer to the data source at the client, NetBackup increases the speed and efficiency of backups in remote offices, data centers and virtual environments and reduces network traffic by up to 90 percent. Deduplication built into the backup client eliminates the need for additional specialized hardware and configuration since customers just need to upgrade to the latest version to realize dramatic storage savings.

NetBackup also helps enterprises to better leverage third party storage appliances from hardware partners through the Symantec OpenStorage Technology (OST) program. According to the 2010 State Of The Data Center report, 62 percent of survey respondents said deduplication should be both built-in to backup software and implemented in deduplication appliances. Integration with NetBackup through OST allows organizations to also leverage deduplication hardware from a wide range of partners, including Quantum, ExaGrid Systems, FalconStor and more.

As the adoption of virtual technologies increases, so do backup challenges and complexities. NetBackup simplifies virtual server data protection by standardizing backup of Hyper-V and VMware, increasing the backup speed of virtual environments through both deduplication and block-level incremental backup technology, and delivering efficient single file restore capabilities.

In the 2010 State Of The Data Center survey, organizations cited granular recovery within virtual machine images as the biggest challenge in virtual machine data protection. NetBackup 7 delivers instant file recovery from a block-level incremental backup for VMware vSphere environments and easy recovery of an individual file or folder from an image-level backup of a Hyper-V virtual machine. By leveraging NetBackup’s deduplication and incremental backup technology within virtual environments, organizations can dramatically increase the speed of backups while reducing storage for virtual machine backups up to 95 percent. NetBackup also enables IT administrators to reduce the impact of backup operations on virtual machines by using off-host for Hyper-V and block-level backup technologies for VMware.

Newly integrated replication technology within the NetBackup platform allows organizations to transfer up to 95 percent less data between various locations. This helps ensure quick and easy recovery of applications and backup data anywhere and at any time, reducing costs and management cycles associated with tape-based disaster recovery. NetBackup also adds backup catalog replication as a standard feature within the main console, which further simplifies and streamlines disaster recovery.

To help customers centrally manage their data protection environments and provide a single view of their backup and recovery operation, NetBackup 7 introduces a built-in reporting and management console called OpsCenter. This new console standardizes monitoring and reporting of both backup and archive information for key Symantec products including NetBackup, NetBackup PureDisk, Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault. Organizations can also leverage advanced analytical features and report on third party backup products using OpsCenter Analytics. This combined functionality allows organizations to reduce disaster recovery risks across locations and standardize how they view both backup and archive information.

Symantec offers a broad array of services to help organizations deploy, integrate and operate highly effective NetBackup environments. NetBackup Services help organizations get the most from their NetBackup investments by improving storage efficiency, infrastructure use and recovery times.

Symantec NetBackup 7 is scheduled to be available worldwide on Feb. 1, 2010 with a suggested price of $7,995 USD for an Enterprise Server and five client licenses.

Release: Symantec Workspace Virtualization 6.1 SP1

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Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) 6.1 Service Pack 1 (build 6.1.5104) is now available to the public.

For existing customers (if you already have a license key) you can download the update here – public download site.

For new Customers (those that don’t have a license key) can download it from the trial ware site.

New features include:

  • Windows 7 Support – Support has been added for 32-bit versions of Windows 7.
  • Increased Streaming Performance – Several enhancements were made to increase performance when streaming virtual packages.
  • Workspace Profiles Support – New profiles exclude feature has been added to support excluding all files from a user’s profile.  This lets Workspace Virtualization integrate with Workspace Profiles.

David Marshall’s Sneak Peek at Symantec VIBES

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Symantec‘s R&D engineers are working on a new virtual machine technology that is focused on protecting users from online attacks while surfing the Web.  It works under the concept of setting up multiple virtual machines on a user’s physical machine.  And then, it enables a user to perform operations of different security levels and different scenario based transactions in each of the different virtual machines.  The so-called VIBES prototype puts a new spin on things to significantly improve browser security.

David Marshall got a sneak peek of VIBES at Symantec’s R&D labs, and you can read the rest of his report here.