Quite every major IT firm is announcing or deliverying management tools for multiple virtualization platoforms. In most cases this means just extending official support to VMware, Microsoft and Xen-based hypervisors. Other times it means providing new agents. In more rare cases this means launching brand new products, with innovative features focused on datacenter automation.
In any case such big interest from IT industry and not just customers means server virtualization is definitively accepted as a mainstream technology.
Symantec is the last new entry in this hot segment with an updated version of its Veritas Application Director. Quoting from the official announcement:
Symantec Corp. today announced major new capabilities within its Veritas Server Foundation product family to transform the emerging field of Data Center Automation (DCA).
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Application Director enables customers to define an application?s run-time requirements, such as its CPU and memory needs, network and storage connectivity, dependencies across internal application components and tiers, and its business priority. Users can then create and enforce policies based on those requirements to control when and where applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments enabling them to maximize server utilization, increase application availability and flexibly respond to changes in application workloads.
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Application Director also provides a more granular level of visibility and control for virtualized environments by monitoring the applications within the virtual server, the virtual server itself, and the underlying hardware, as well as enabling the user to start, stop, and migrate the applications and the virtual servers across hosts.Application Director currently supports Solaris Zones from Sun, VMware ESX server from EMC, and AIX Micro-partitions from IBM. Symantec plans to aggressively extend this coverage to support all major virtual machine platforms across all major operating systems…
It’s very interesting the choice of Symantec to start with support for Solaris and VMware but not for Xen and Microsoft.