Novell moving full steam ahead with virtualization

Novell is making advancements and gaining visibility in the virtualization market with its ZENworks product line.

In February of last year, Novell announced it was acquiring the well-known and longtime virtualization third-party software vendor PlateSpin for $205 million. With a well-established brand awareness and well-liked virtualization product line, the PlateSpin acquisition helped thrust Novell further into the virtualization spotlight.

A few months ago, the company announced that it would rebrand its ZENworks Orchestrator product to PlateSpin Orchestrate. That time has come. Only three months later and Novell is ready to release PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.

[ In a surprising move, Novell acquired PlateSpin for $205M cash | Stephen Pollack leaves PlateSpin after Novell acquisition, but shares his knowledge with other virtualization startups. ]

The company is marketing core features of PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0, such as:

• Extended hypervisor support for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX and ESXi and Xen integrated in Suse Linux Enterprise Server
• Native VMware ESX support that eliminates the need to use VMware vCenter to manage ESX-based virtual machines
• Slick, intuitive and easy-to-use interface to ease the manual virtual machine management of complex virtual infrastructures across multiple hypervisor technologies from multiple vendors
• LDAP support that enables direct integration with industry-leading user directories to simplify user management
• Advanced automation based on user-defined events and triggers
• Dramatically improved scalability for servicing hundreds of virtual machine hosts

But perhaps even more interesting than this is the release of Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization 7, Novell’s application virtualization platform powered by an OEM agreement signed with Xenocode. And this latest platform release is now integrated with Novell ZENworks Configuration Management.

[ Novell’s ZENworks Application Virtualization solution is powered by “Xenocoded” virtual applications ]

With this latest release, customers can quickly package applications into a secure, stand-alone executable that can be distributed and run on any Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Windows 2000 workstation without a traditional install.

As part of the company’s complete endpoint management strategy, ZENworks Application Virtualization allows customers to restrict virtual applications from running on devices not registered with their ZENworks Configuration Management zone.

And customers can now convert legacy applications into virtual applications to help eliminate compatibility issues and prevent interference with other applications.

Novell is now on the virtualization train, and it’s proceeding full steam ahead.