VMWare infrastructure gets steel protection

For manufacturers using VMware Infrastructure 3 to take advantage of the cost and management benefits of server consolidation, it looks like a strong solution for ensuring availability of the entire virtualised environment. SteelEye Technology’s Protection Suite is said to complement the high availability technologies already built into VMware Infrastructure 3 in the form of VMware HA and VMware Consolidated Backup – by delivering advanced data replication and high availability clustering technologies to monitor and automatically recover the entire environment. “As companies migrate business-critical applications from physical environments into virtual environments, ensuring the availability of applications residing within those virtual servers is critical,“ comments Jean Bozman, vice president of analyst IDC’s Enterprise Computing group. “With its support for VMware Virtual Infrastructure virtualised environments, SteelEye’s extension of these clustering capabilities into virtual environment protection is a logical next step that preserves a common model for protecting applications in both the P and V environments.” For example, while VMware HA protects virtual machines from hardware failure, SteelEye LifeKeeper provides protection against operating system and application failures within the virtual machine. Running within either Linux or Windows guest operating systems, LifeKeeper monitors applications and all dependencies, including file systems, device drivers, IP addresses and data connections, to ensure that any failure is automatically detected and recovered. Recovery can include restarting the application within the same virtual machine, migrating the application to a virtual machine on the same server, migrating it to a virtual machine on a different server or performing failover to a physical server.