How does Symantec ApplicationHA integrate/work with VMware HA?

I briefly touched on this topic already, but I guess on Yellow-Bricks the primary focus should be technical. I downloaded Symantec’s Application HA and decided to give it a spin, I already started documenting the installation of the ApplicationHA Console and the Guest Component but Mr Sloof beat me to it and documented his finding in the following two articles.

• ApplicationHA – Install and Configure
• The ApplicationHA Configuration Wizard – Monitoring SQL Server 2008

No need to repeat it in my opinion as Eric did an excellent job. I do want to point two things out and they are around the requirements/constraints of the product:

• Symantec ApplicationHA Console requires Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • The Console provides the integration between vCenter and ApplicationHA from a UI perspective. An ApplicationHA tab will be added to the vSphere Client which can be used to configure and control ApplicationHA.
• A 64Bit Guest OS is required for the ApplicationHA Windows Guest Component.
  • This is the actually component that enables application level protection.

This basically means that if you are primarily using 32Bit OS’s, like I for instance do in my homelab, it won’t work as the installer literally throws an error that the VM doesn’t meet the requirements. That is for now, as I bet that when demand grows Symantec will add support for 32Bit OSs.

So what is this ApplicationHA product?

Symantec ApplicationHA is an extension of VM / Application Monitoring. Symantec simplified Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) to enable application availability monitoring including of course responding to issues. Just to be absolutely clear, the foundation still is VCS based the unnecessary bits and pieces were taken out. Note that it is not a multi-node clustering solution like VCS itself but a single node solution.

The question remains how does it integrate with vCenter and more specifically with HA?

Lets start with the integration with vCenter. This is where the “ApplicationHA Console” comes into play. It basically adds a tab on a VM level that gives you the details of this VM in terms of ApplicationHA of course depending on the fact if you installed the Guest Component or not the Tab will display different info. Ultimately it should look as follows:

--> The rest is on the Yellow-Bricks Website :

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/11/03/how-does-symantec-applicationha-integratework-with-vmware-ha/