Symantec Corp. today announced the latest version of Symantec ApplicationHA, Symantec’s 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. This enables organizations to confidently move their business critical applications into VMware virtual machines.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Integration

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.

New Dashboard Management

ApplicationHA now features new extensive 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.

Enhanced Installation

ApplicationHA is now easier to install than ever before. 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.

"VMware and Symantec’s strategic partnership to deliver and enhance ApplicationHA gives our customers the ability to react to infrastructure and application failures without the loss of desirable functionality that our customers expect. New ApplicationHA integration with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager helps ensure high availability of applications regardless of which site is running the virtual machine,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware.

“With today’s announcement, we’re enhancing the value of ApplicationHA and VMwareHA. Customers can have confidence in their disaster recovery efforts with new SRM integration while growing their businesses by leveraging the new dashboard to scale requirements in VMware environments,” said Don Angspatt, vice president, Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group , Symantec.

Pricing and Availability

Symantec ApplicationHA 5.1 SP2 is now available worldwide with a list price of $350 USD per virtual machine. Symantec ApplicationHA supports major platforms including Windows, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and SuSE Linux Enterprise.