VMware and Symantec Partner with VCS

I was just forwarded an interesting article on the new-found relationship between Symantec and VMware. Some readers may be familiar with Veritas Clustering Services (VCS) and it's integration with VMware. From my own experiences, I always thought it was a great idea. I had seen VCS in action with the x's (linux, unix, etc), and had seen a demo of it in action with VMware about a year ago. We even recommended it to a customer, but unfortunately the Symantec sales team and the distributor had no idea how to quote it and it took about 3 different transfers on the phone to get someone who knew what we were talking about. To me it seemed like someone said "hey it works in linux, esx is kinda linux, lets brand it." Now I don't know if that is what really happened, but it wasn't fully baked.

I guess the past is the past and now Symantec is on the virtualization fast track. The new VCS integration is now a little smarter. It now understands that a vmotion is not a host failure, it is more application aware and also integrates with the ESX host and the guests. However powerful that may be, the best part of the article was of course the drama. The author hints at how the new change of guard at VMware and the soon to be change of guard at Symantec may have sparked the reconciliation and buried the confrontational past.

Link to Article in SearchDisasterRecovery.com

Update:
Another article in the sister site to SearchDisasterRecovery.com has an article describing how VCS can integrate with vCenter to provide high availability on the vCenter side. It bridges the gap that we currently have with either using MSCS or putting vCenter in the ESX world as a vm.

Link to Article in SearchServerVirtualization.com