Veritas Cluster Server (VCS), formerly known as Symantec Cluster Server, is a high availability clustering software solution developed by Veritas Technologies. Let’s explore its history and features:

History of Veritas Cluster Server:
– Veritas Cluster Server originated from the VCS product line, which was originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 1980s.
– In 1999, Symantec Corporation acquired the VCS product line from DEC and continued its development.
– In 2016, Symantec’s Information Management business, which included VCS, was acquired by Veritas Technologies. Since then, Veritas Cluster Server has been developed and maintained by Veritas Technologies.

Features of Veritas Cluster Server:
1. High Availability: Veritas Cluster Server ensures high availability of applications and services by providing rapid and automatic failover capabilities. It monitors the health of resources and initiates failover to standby systems in case of failures, minimizing downtime and ensuring service continuity.
2. Scalability and Clustering: VCS allows the creation of clusters comprising multiple servers, providing scalability and load balancing capabilities. It supports both active-active and active-passive configurations, enabling efficient resource utilization and workload distribution.
3. Application-Awareness: VCS offers application-level monitoring and management, allowing administrators to define custom application agents. These agents enable intelligent monitoring and control of applications, ensuring their availability and maintaining their specific requirements during failover and recovery.
4. Heterogeneous Platform Support: Veritas Cluster Server supports a wide range of operating systems, including various versions of UNIX, Linux, and Windows. This makes it suitable for diverse IT environments and allows the clustering of mixed-platform environments.
5. Cluster File System Support: VCS integrates with cluster file systems like Veritas File System (VxFS) and Veritas Cluster File System (VxCFS), providing shared access to data across cluster nodes. This enables applications to maintain data consistency and availability during failovers.
6. Intelligent Monitoring and Failure Detection: VCS employs advanced monitoring techniques, including heartbeat mechanisms, health checks, and failure detection algorithms, to proactively identify and respond to system and application failures.
7. Centralized Management: Veritas Cluster Server provides a centralized management console, which allows administrators to configure, monitor, and manage the cluster environment. It offers a graphical user interface (GUI) and command-line interfaces (CLIs) for simplified administration and control.
8. Disaster Recovery Integration: VCS integrates with disaster recovery solutions like Veritas Volume Replicator, enabling data replication and failover to remote disaster recovery sites. This ensures business continuity and data protection in the event of site failures or disasters.
9. Application-Consistent Recovery: VCS coordinates the recovery of clustered applications, ensuring that they resume normal operation in a consistent state after failover. This includes managing the order and timing of application startup and ensuring data integrity.
10. Continuous Access to Data: Veritas Cluster Server ensures continuous access to critical data by providing transparent failover and load balancing for applications accessing shared storage resources. This helps maintain data availability and minimizes disruption to users.

Veritas Cluster Server is a robust and feature-rich solution for achieving high availability and fault tolerance in mission-critical environments. Its extensive platform support, application-awareness, and disaster recovery integration make it suitable for a wide range of applications and IT infrastructures.