VMware’s Heartbeat Offers High Availability for vCenter Server

VMware is looking to bring new high-availability capabilities to its vCenter Server with a new product called Heartbeat, which is designed to protect the vCenter Server against unexpected downtime.
The VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat was just one of many announcements the x86 virtualization company made at its VMworld Europe 2009 conference. In a much-publicized move, CEO and President Paul Maritz used the event to offer a road map of VMware’s future in cloud computing.
The vCenter Server Heartbeat solution continually monitors the VMware vCenter Server, including its database and service components, to protect the system against a whole range of failures, errors and downtime-causing events. It also provides replication and failover of the vCenter Server to either another server within the data center or else to an off-site data center, using a LAN or WAN (wide area network), respectively.

The replication and failover is hardware-agnostic.
Available in March, the VMware vCenter Server Heart will retail for $9,995 per VMware vCenter Server, if purchased separately from the VMware vCenter Server license. If purchased in a bundle with the VMware VCenter Server license, the final cost will be $12,995.

“Ninety-four percent of surveyed VMware customers report that they run applications in production on the VMware platform,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of VMware’s server business unit, in a statement. “Now more than ever, customers require resiliency for their virtualization management infrastructure.”
VMware has licensed vCenter Server Heartbeat from partner Neverfail, which creates products designed to minimize data and productivity loss in the event of server downtime. Its core product, the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite, replicates data from active to passive server to ensure continuity and data protection.
Neverfail also has strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, Vodafone, Microsoft and Citrix. The latter two are in increasingly fierce competition with VMware over the growing virtualization market.