Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced collaboration with VMware to deliver enhanced high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions for VMware environments. The initiative includes: cooperative support through the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet) for mutual customers leveraging Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) for VMware ESX in VMware environments; integration between VCS and VMware Infrastructure to deliver complementary HA/DR solutions; and enhancements to VCS that enable HA/DR for VMware vCenter.

“VMware is pleased to see Symantec deliver solutions like VCS for high availability that integrate with and complement the value of VMware virtualization for customers and reinforce the importance of a strong partner ecosystem that helps differentiate VMware virtualization,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. “We look forward to continued collaboration with Symantec to enable support for VCS for VMware users and improve the experience for joint customers through initiatives such as the TSANet-based cooperative support agreement announced today.”

The collaborative support initiative between Symantec and VMware through TSANet delivers highly trained support expertise to solve customers’ high availability needs. Already a global member of TSANet, Symantec has now joined a cooperative support community for virtualization established by VMware earlier this year to promote collaboration to deliver mission-critical support for joint enterprise customers. Coordinated response, information exchange and reduced response times will improve the support experience for mutual customers.

Symantec’s VCS is a complementary solution for VMware environments that protects mission-critical applications from unplanned downtime. By taking an application-centric approach to HA/DR, VCS delivers comprehensive protection from failures regardless of where or how they occur. VCS is fully integrated with VMware vCenter, supplementing key VMware capabilities such as VMware VMotion™ for reducing planned downtime and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for active workload management.

Together, VCS and VMware Infrastructure give customers excellent protection from downtime, whether planned or unplanned. VCS is part of the VCS family of HA/DR solutions available for heterogeneous physical and virtual environments, delivering a common HA/DR platform across the modern data center.

Symantec has also developed new enhancements in VCS to provide high availability support for VMware vCenter, adding protection to a critical component of the virtual infrastructure. One in four respondents in a recent disaster recovery survey sponsored by Symantec said that protecting VMware vCenter was one of the top two challenges in making their virtual environments highly available. In addition to protecting applications from unplanned downtime, VCS now also protects VMware vCenter from unplanned downtime, enabling availability of critical services such as virtual machine provisioning, performance monitoring, utilization control, and live migration with VMware VMotion.

“Virtualization increases the need for HA/DR solutions that protect the availability of mission-critical applications,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server Group. “We are excited to work with VMware to deliver an HA/DR platform for unplanned downtime that complements existing VMware technology such as VMotion for planned downtime, ensuring complete application availability. Symantec and VMware will provide organizations with integrated availability solutions and support to ensure their applications are fully protected at all times.”