Symantec announced today at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas that upgrades to its popular Backup Exec family of products will focus on better support for virtualised operating systems.

"We have revved these products to give a bigger focus on virtualisation, and added new management features and platform support," said Pat Hanavan, data centre and product management vice president at Symantec.

Hanavan pointed out that data protection with virtualised systems gets harder when firms deploy virtualisation.

"Our new software supports the latest virtual environments - Citrix XenServer 4.x, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX 3.5," he said.

Symantec's BackUp Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) will also support Microsoft's Windows Essential Business Server 2008 due for release later this year.

The company is also claiming new point-in-time recovery options for SQL Server 2008, better recovery options for SharePoint, a new remote media agent for Linux servers, and better support for network data management protocol-based NAS systems.

BESR will also have integrated 'cold imaging' technology, allowing recovery of 'dead' desktop operating systems.

Backup Exec 12.5 and BESR 8.5 will be generally available on 6 October. BackUp Exec will cost £521 + VAT per media server. BESR 8.5 costs £573 + VAT per server and £36 + VAT per workstation.