XenSource Inks Deal With Symantec

XenSource and Symantec announced that they will work to integrate Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation into XenEnterprise this fall. This is good news for XenSource customers and should increase the "enterprise worthiness" of the company's flagship XenEnterprise virtualization offering.

In our recent review of XenEnterprise 3.2, we dinged the product for single-repository limitations and less-than-optimal storage performance and administration functionality. In this announcement, the companies promise seamless storage management for major server and storage arrays and say they'll enable advanced storage functionality, including utilization optimization, dynamic multi-pathing and point-in-time copies.

Better storage options are a good thing, and tight integration with an industry storage leader is a solid bet to improve market share. As XenSource updates its product line this fall and beyond, it also promises a new high-availability offering, addressing customer requests for live failover of hosted VMs and more fault-tolerant virtualized environments. This HA product is to be jointly certified with Symantec.

A strategic partnership with Symantec will make XenSource products more attractive to Veritas Storage Foundation customers, and the incorporation of storage virtualization technology into the XenEnterprise hypervisor should provide a needed performance and functionality boost. XenSource's ongoing relationship with Microsoft likewise bodes well for XenSource customers.

If the Symantec relationship plays out as advertised, the folks at VMware should be looking over their collective shoulder as this "Linux niche" virtualization player enhances its enterprise feature set. We'll be keeping our eyes out for additional Xen partnership agreements and product offerings as Symantec develops its "virtual appliance" security offerings and the virtualization marketplace continues to mature.