In March 2009, VMware signed an agreement with Neverfail to use its technology for vCenter fail-over.
Called vCenter Server Heartbeat, the product impacted the business of other VMware’s partners, including Double-Take, SteelEye and CA.
Earlier this week Neverfail announced that the OEM agreement with VMware has been renewed. vSphere 4.1 in fact includes vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3, which ships with the new Continuous Availability Director.
The new module is a centralized management console to view the status of multiple vCenter Servers and their associated back-end databases.
Interestingly, Neverfail reports that more 500 customers adopted the solutions since early 2009. It seems a pretty low number considering that VMware has over 200,000 customers worldwide and most of them are enterprise ones.
Neverfail also announced the availability of a new version of vAppHA.
vAppHA, originally released in 2009, checks the status of applications inside the virtual machines guest operating systems. If any of the ones Neverfail monitors becomes unresponsive or very slow vAppHA interacts with vSphere through its API to either restart the VM or move it on another host.
The new version of vAppHA introduces support for vSphere 4.1 and this means that now Neverfail can leverage the new VMware Application Monitoring API that provides native heartbeat monitoring between the VM and the host.
vAppHA continues to use the same fail-over engine that powers vCenter Server Heartbeat.