Symantec Adds Workflow Smarts to Server Foundation Tools

Published: May 9, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Symantec this week rolled out Veritas Server Foundation version 6.0, a new release of its cross-platform suite of tools for managing servers and applications in large data centers. When the new suite ships in July, IT professionals will benefit from new workflow engine that automates many of the mundane tasks that go into provisioning systems, tracking their changes over time, and managing applications.

With this new version of VSF, Symantec has updated three of the suite's four components, including Veritas Configuration Manager (VCM), Veritas Provisioning Manager (VPM), and Veritas Application Director (VAD). Veritas Cluster Server (VCS), the company's flagship product for clustering, was not updated with this release. (VSF is not to be confused with Veritas Storage Foundation, which is Symantec's foundation for SAN virtualization and Windows high availability software).

With VPM 5.0, Symantec has instituted a new "workflow and process orchestration" system designed to speed the process of provisioning new servers. According to Bryan Dye, a senior director of product management for Symantec, it takes on average 25 days for an organization to deploy an Oracle database. "The actual amount of working time, with light scripting, is six to eight hours. All the other time is wait time," he says.

VPM 5.0 addresses this dilemma by "breaking the visibility" barrier, sending notifications, and automating as many of the provisioning server tasks as possible. The software enforces company rules, such as that Oracle databases must be tested on servers with 16 CPUs and eight GB of memory, Dice says. Just the same, VPM 6.0 maintains a certain degree of flexibility.

With VCM 6.0, Symantec is concentrating on rooting out "configuration drift." Over time, the configuration settings on applications and servers will change, putting nodes in a cluster at risk of not working during a failover, and raising the possibility that pre-production testing won't adequately reflect production settings, leading to total application failure, among other problems. With VCM 6.0, users get more granular configuration comparison capabilities and new consistency checks to detect configuration drift.

VSF 6.0 also includes VAD 1.1, a new release of the product designed to provide a high degree of control over the starting and stopping of applications in virtual environments. With this release, Symantec added support for VMware 's ESX Server version 3.0.1 and Windows Server 2003.

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