Double-Take to Deliver Virtual HA Software with VMware

Published: April 26, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Windows high availability software developer Double-Take Software (formerly NSI Software) last week unveiled plans to build a new virtual machine replication and failover product in conjunction with VMware, a subsidiary of EMC.

Double-Take's new solution will be based on VMware's ESX Server virtualization software, and will give users the choice of running Windows, Linux, NetWare, or any other VMware-supported operating system. The new technology will replicate entire virtual disks--including everything from the operating system and applications to patches and data--as opposed to just the applications and the data at the file level, as with the former NSI Software's popular Double-Take replication software.

The week before, Double-Take announced it had entered into VMware's alliance program to find a better way to license its software in virtual environments. While, technically, customers could already do this, the licensing issue was troublesome, as Double-Take was requiring licenses for each virtual machine. Users also were less than thrilled with their replication and failover capabilities when trying to use just one copy of Double-Take, as the software makes special concessions for Active Directory and DNS replication during failover.

The new product--which wasn't given a name or a release date--will widen Double-Take's support beyond the Windows world it is traditionally associated with. "While Double-Take is widely used today to protect Windows virtual machines or replicate physical Windows servers to virtual disaster recovery targets, we are seeing more and more customers run production workloads on a virtual infrastructure," says David Demlow, Double-Take's CTO. "These workloads are often running a variety of Linux distributions as well as Windows. We've designed something that will give our customers an option to protect any OS running as a guest on the ESX Server with the same level of protection and availability they've come to expect from our market-leading Double-Take product."