Symantec announced its Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, a solution offering advanced storage capabilities for virtual server environments that effectively manage storage in large scale, x86 production environments.

Expected to be available in the fall, Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines new, advanced storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with the flexible, high-performance Citrix XenServer virtualization technology from Citrix Systems.

Symantec stated that Veritas Virtual Infrastructure will allow users to fully benefit from server virtualization while both preserving current best practices in storage management from the physical environment and leveraging new opportunities provided by virtualized environments.

Symantec explained that Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a new distributed volume manager specifically designed to deliver advanced storage management capabilities for virtual servers. Unlike current approaches that prevent virtual servers from directly managing storage, Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a client/server architecture that establishes an individual relationship between each virtual server and its underlying storage, just as if it were a physical server. Furthermore, because it leverages Storage Foundation, users can realize all of these benefits from their existing, heterogeneous SAN storage.

"With Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, Symantec is delivering trusted, proven enterprise-class storage management to x86 virtual server environments," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group. "The integration of Veritas Storage Foundation with Citrix XenServer is a significant step to enable IT organizations to manage storage in their x86 virtual server environment with all the same capabilities of a physical environment. Additionally, we plan to extend our leading storage management capabilities to other virtual environments including Microsoft Hyper-V and Sun xVM."