VMware HA currently provides a robust mechanism to detect failures of infrastructure components. This includes failures of the physical servers, the virtual machines, the state of the operating system, and so on. However, VMware HA does not monitor the health of an application running within a virtual machine.
Symantec, on the other hand, has been a market leader in application clustering on physical servers for over a decade. Like other clustering products designed to operate in a physical environment, their ability to react to failures of infrastructure resources within a virtualized environment is limited. The marriage of the capabilities from VMware and Symantec bridges this gap, allowing for a single solution that can react to failures of the entire stack, from the infrastructure to the application. Configuring ApplicationHA increases reliability of application components, while allowing VMware features such as VMware HA, DRS, and DPM to continue to function as expected. This provides efficient high availability services in the event of a failure of an infrastructure component.