XenSource to Embed Veritas Software with XenEnterprise Hypervisor

Published: July 24, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server hypervisor maker XenSource, which is the main force behind the open source Xen hypervisor for X64 processors, has partnered with Symantec to help make the Xen hypervisor integrate better with file systems and archiving software.

XenSource sells a commercially supported version of Xen aimed at mixed Windows and Linux environments, and also assists Linux distros in integrating Xen into their distributions; the company has also has partnered with Microsoft to ensure that its future "Viridian" hypervisor for Windows Server 2008, formerly known as Longhorn Server, will interoperate with the Xen hypervisor. But having Xen running atop an operating system is only half the battle, since when you get right down to it, a virtual machine is really just a giant file residing on a disk and imported in bits into main memory as it runs. Companies want to manage files on a virtualized server in a consistent way, and they also want to back up virtual machine partitions so they are safe. XenSource's partnership with Symantec, which bought file system and archiving software maker Veritas in late 2004, addresses these and other issues.

According to John Barra, vice president of marketing at XenSource, under the agreement between the two companies, XenSource will distribute a copy of the Veritas Storage Foundation stack with each copy of XenEnterprise, the core package that XenSource sells to customers. XenSource is getting ready to launch a much-improved XenEnterprise 4.0 release in August, and by the fourth quarter this software will also include the Veritas license bundled into the price. Right now, XenEnterprise 3.X costs $750 for a perpetual license for every two cores on a server, and Barra says that the price will increase with the 4.0 release to cover new features and the addition of the Veritas software. "The cost is not going to go through the roof," says Barra. "We will still be 20 to 25 percent of the cost of VMware's equivalent product."

Barra is cagey about the feature set that is coming with XenEnterprise 4.0, but did say that live migration of partitions, akin to VMware's VMotion and called XenMotion in the Xen stack, was expected on the update.

The key component of the Veritas Storage Foundation stack that XenSource wants on behalf of its customers is the volume manager, which manages storage volumes as the name suggests. The volume manager will be embedded inside XenEnterprise and will allow for utilization optimization, load balancing I/O workloads across storage arrays and between servers that link to them, as well as providing dynamic multipathing between virtual machines on servers and the storage arrays that houses the data that they use. The Veritas software also allows point-in-time copies of running VMs to be captured and archived, which is important for both disaster recovery and for testing new applications.

To further take on VMware, which has created disaster recovery extensions to its ESX Server hypervisor with its Infrastructure 3 suite, XenSource and Symantec are working on a new product called XenEnterprise High Availability, which will allow the automatic failover of virtual machines, ensuring that their applications do not get wiped out by a crash. A software crash can take out a virtual machine just as surely as it can take down a physical one, after all. XenSource and Veritas are also going to work to ensure that Symantec's NetBackup software can deal with XenEnterprise environments. XenEnterprise HA and the NetBackup certification are also expected some time in the fourth quarter.

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