virtualization.info

As most loyal virtualization.info readers know, this website publishes a report detailing the top 10 challenges in virtualization adoption.
The report didn’t change a single bit from 2007 to 2008: the report still lists ISVs support as the top issue in embracing virtualization.

Of course things change in two years, so we wanted to verify how our readers rate such issue at the end of 2008.
To do so not one but two questions of our Hardware Virtualization Adoption Survey 2008 were dedicated to this very topic.

Surprisingly enough, on over 1000 responses received in less than one month, a very small percent of people indicated the ISVs support as the biggest obstacle in adopting virtualization (just 9%) or as the biggest challenge in implementing a certain virtualization project (just 2%).

(don’t worry: virtualization.info will publish the complete results of this survey in the next few weeks)

We were ready to drastically change the report for 2009, moving support to the last position, when a remarkable issue was highlighted by the guys at vinternals.

Symantec just published a knowledge base article stating that the company doesn’t provide support for two key products, Symantec Antivirus (SAV) and Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP), when used inside VMware ESX virtual machines with VMotion in use.

The official reason for this support denial is:

There have been many issues reported a few examples are,

• Client communication problems
• Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) communication issues
• Content update failures
• Policy update failures
• Client data does not get entered in to the database
• Replication failures

As vinternals guys say (with some vivid words):

I urge every enterprise on the planet who are customers of both VMware and Symantec to rain fire and brimstone upon Symantec (I've already started), because your entire server and VDI infrastructure is at this time officially unsupported.

So let’s ask this again: is ISVs support for the hypervisor of choice still a top issue or not?
Oracle customers can avoid to complain on this, we know their answer…

Labels: Symantec, VMware