Symantec Corp. today unveiled Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) 5.0 for VMware ESX, bringing high availability and disaster recovery to heterogeneous data centers running virtual server software. VCS for VMware ESX automates remote failover for disaster recovery and provides management of clustered virtual and physical servers. Ideally suited to prevent downtime in case of application, virtual machine, network link, or server failures, VCS for VMware ESX centralizes cluster management in a single ESX server or across a campus or WAN. ... VCS for VMware ESX provides added protection against virtual machine or application failures, including:

• Application and resource monitoring, as well as server monitoring, which provides a higher level of availability
• Automatic recovery from application, network storage, virtual resource, virtual server, and physical server failures
• Centralized management of virtual and physical resources and servers from a single console
• Comprehensive testing for disaster recovery integrating both application failover and data replication to enable organizations to test disaster recovery without disrupting production environments

... Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2007. Pricing for VCS for VMware ESX starts at $1,995 per server...